Stop guessing whether your Chinese supplier is real.
Flying a team to China costs $15,000 and three weeks. A $300 checklist audit tells you the fire exits are clear. Neither tells you whether this factory will still be standing in eighteen months. That is the question we answer — for $980, in five days.
Everyone audits. Nobody tells you the truth.
Standard audits verify compliance. They count fire extinguishers and tick boxes. They are not built to answer the question you actually have: can I wire money to this company?
One decision at the top. Everything behind it, checkable.
This is the delivered report for VD-2610-017 — an on-site audit of a die-casting shop in Taizhou. One high-severity finding, one mid, one low. Published in full, including the parts that make us look bad.
Start at 100, subtract 25 for each high finding, 8 for mid, 3 for low. The weights ship with the code and the page shows the sum. Nobody types a verdict into a form — so two audits of the same facts cannot disagree.
Two high-severity findings veto the order no matter what the score says. A rule that lives only inside a sum is a rule your sales contact can negotiate away.
Each finding is numbered and traceable to what was photographed on site — the meter reading, the ledger page, the machine nameplate. Originals are kept for three years, EXIF intact.
The seal is an HMAC over the order, the verdict, the man-days and every finding title. Edit one line in the database and it stops matching. The verify endpoint answers true or false — and never hands back the right answer.
Delivery turns each finding into a tracked corrective action with a due date. The factory cannot tick its own fix as done, and neither can the buyer — evidence is only accepted by the technical reviewer, who never went to the site.
Read one before you order.
Three engagements, three different verdicts, all in metalworking. Names are changed; the findings are not.
Dongguan Hengrui Precision Hardware Co., Ltd.
Workable — but capacity is 40% of what they quoted
Ningbo Taihe Metal Products Co., Ltd.
Safe to order — watch the ownership change
Cangzhou Hongsheng Casting Co., Ltd.
Do not order. An 18% discount is not worth this risk
Five days, four steps, one decision.
Tell us who to check
Company name, address, what you're buying. If all you have is a WhatsApp contact and a business card, that is enough to start.
We dispatch a local auditor
Not a courier with a camera. An auditor who has spent years in your product category, in that industrial cluster.
A full day on the floor
Counting machines, reading meters, pulling ledgers, and talking to the owner, the manager and the operators — separately.
You get a verdict, not a score
One decision, five scores, every red flag with its evidence, and the exact clauses to negotiate before you pay.
The hard part isn't finding auditors. It's stopping them from lying.
Every claim below is enforced by something that refuses an action, not by a sentence in a policy document. Three of them, with the actual output.
The dispatch endpoint returns the reason each auditor was rejected alongside the ranking. The console has no 'assign anyway' button. Familiarity is where bribes start.
See an order's timeline →'We fixed it' and 'it is fixed' are different claims. There is no transition that skips verification, and the waiver path needs a written decision from the buyer.
See open findings →No commission, no referral fee, no paid 'expedited pass'. The moment revenue touches the supplier, the report becomes a sales document.
Six operating rules →A negative verdict needs two signatures
Any 'do not order' is co-signed by a second auditor who never went to the site. If the two disagree, both opinions are printed in the report.
Originals kept for three years
Photos are stored with their original EXIF — shutter time, GPS, device. A cropped JPEG proves nothing; the question is whether it was taken where and when we say.
Priced per factory, not per hour.
Two things move the number — a remote province and a rush date — and both are separate lines in the quote. No report fee, no weekend premium, no re-quote after the visit.
Desk check
No site visit. Public records plus a live video walk-through to confirm the factory exists and matches its claims. For first-contact suppliers.
- ✓ Licence and registered address check
- ✓ Litigation, defaulter and tax screening
- ✓ Owner's affiliated-entity mapping
- ✓ 30-minute live video walk-through
- ✓ One-page verdict and risk list
On-site audit
An auditor spends one to one and a half days on site: equipment count, ledger cross-check, three levels of interviews, and GPS/time-stamped photo evidence.
- ✓ Everything in Desk check
- ✓ Equipment count and capacity recalculation
- ✓ Power, payroll and insurance ledger cross-checks
- ✓ Interviews at owner, manager and operator level
- ✓ Red-flag list with negotiation advice
- ✓ Full 8–15 page report
Annual monitoring
One full audit plus a quarterly risk snapshot. Ownership changes, litigation, payroll gaps and power anomalies get pushed to you.
- ✓ Everything in On-site audit
- ✓ Four quarterly risk snapshots
- ✓ Ownership, litigation and tax alerts
- ✓ Power-consumption anomaly monitoring
- ✓ Follow-up audits at 20% off
The discount applies after the surcharges — distance doesn't become free because the order is big. And the total is computed server-side: whatever the browser sends, the amount is not negotiable.
For reference: a three-person team flying to China costs $15,000+. A QIMA audit runs $350–500 per man-day and covers compliance scope only. We are not cheaper than them — we answer a different question.
Questions buyers ask on the first call.
How is this different from QIMA or SGS?
They sell breadth and compliance. We sell one judgement. A standard audit is a checklist run by one inspector for one day — it tells you whether the factory meets a written standard. We spend the same day asking what the standard does not cover: is the stated capacity real, is the process actually in-house, does the owner's story survive contact with the production manager.
We are not cheaper. An audit from them runs $350–500 per man-day; ours is $980 for a deeper scope. If what you need is a compliance certificate, they are the right answer and we will say so.
Will my customer or brand accept your report?
No — and we will not claim otherwise. Brand-mandated audits (BSCI, SMETA, WRAP) can only be issued by authorised firms. Our report is for your own purchasing decision, not for submission to a buyer.
In practice most of our clients use both: the branded report to satisfy the customer, ours to decide whether to place the order at all.
Can you run a BSCI or SMETA audit?
No. Those require amfori or Sedex approval, which we do not have. Anyone who tells you otherwise is either misinformed or planning to subcontract it to someone who does — and then the price includes a margin you did not agree to.
Will the factory know I ordered this?
They will know someone is looking, because an auditor has to walk in. They will not know who. We approach as a prospective buyer, and your name, company and enquiry never leave our system.
We do not pretend to be a mystery shopper either. A factory that refuses a legitimate look is telling you something, and we write that down.
What if you find nothing wrong?
Then you paid $980 for a decision instead of gambling $40,000 on one. A clean report is a result, not a refund — the factory that passes is the one you should be scaling with, and now you know which questions to stop asking.
How do I know you're not taking money from factories?
You do not, on faith. Three things are checkable: our revenue comes only from buyers, auditors rotate so no one visits the same factory twice, and any negative verdict needs a second signature from someone who never went. The mechanics are on the About page.
What if the factory refuses the visit?
A legitimate factory has no reason to refuse a prospective buyer's site visit. Refusal is itself the finding, and it goes at the top of the report. You still pay for the day — the auditor travelled, and the answer is real.
Do you cover industries other than metalworking?
Six categories: metalworking, sheet metal, casting, plastics and tooling, textiles, electronics. Outside those we either decline or quote with a named auditor whose background we can defend. We do not send a generalist to a specialist factory.
Which supplier are you about to pay?
Send us the name and the address. We will tell you what we find before your deposit clears.
Order a check