I don't know what the pricing is, tbh, I don't recall. Our quality manager handled that. It was in-place before I came to this company. I have never used any similar software, so I cannot compare. With that said:
I like it for what it is. You'll want to make sure you set up your template files carefully and thoughtfully so that everything works well. The text-recognition is pretty good. We have a lot of customers so things vary a LOT for us. I have to change the default tolerances frequently, job to job, depending on the customer and their drawing tolerance blocks. It's not terribly painful. Pretty quick to do. It'll take your Excel-template file and fill it all out the way you want. Upper/Lower limits, Nominal, etc. All good. You have to 'build' all your Feature Control Frames because it will not recognize GD&T FCFs from a PDF. It's kind of a PITA. Sometimes you have to manually type things in because it just won't read the text correctly, whether it's pdf/print quality, the font, or whatever else. So you always have the backup manual-entry method.
If everything goes smoothly, I just go through, click and drag a rectangle around every dimension, one to the next. For simple untoleranced dimensions, it successfully reads it ~80% of the time and I have to make no manual edits (though they're quick). I'd say it does everything right on directly toleranced dimensions about 1/3 to 1/2 of the time. Manual edits are quick there, too. Sometimes it's a matter of re-selecting the nominal dimension, then re-selected the tolerance numbers (whether it's +/- .005, +.005/-.000 or vertically stacked +/- numbers. It seems to do better with limits-dimensions)
If I'm rocking and rolling through a print that's a very-dense 3 D-size sheets with ~6 views per sheet, I should get it completely finished anywhere from 15 minutes to an hour. Depends on how much I have to stop and think about things, how much correcting/manual entry I have to do. There's typically no cleanup required in the outputted Excel file and very little has to be manually entered (PO Number, Serial Number, things like that, which don't come from drawings) and we'll add a few things to the list of inspection criteria that requires a sign-off, like F.O.D. inspections or process-critical steps. We even put a blanket "Verify part is free of burrs" entry to ensure that someone has looked at them and signs off that it was done. That stuff can be manually entered as a 'note' in InspectionXpert, or added directly to the generated Excel file.
God help you if you need technical support though. We were having issues getting a new version installed. It's an installer that requires internet connection as it installs from their servers directly. No offline installer. They kept claiming it was our firewall. IT guy, against his better judgment, disabled all firewall settings on my computer; still failed. After 3 weeks.
3.
weeks.
Of back-and-forth phone calls and me getting pissy, they finally admitted that their installer is often caught as being malware - some of the connections or installations they run would be caught and connections denied. We can't see exactly what's going on in order to whitelist their activity specifically. Their solution was to take my computer to an off-site location, connect to an unrestricted network and install there.
My work computer. With valuable company software and property and ITAR restricted material. They wanted me to apparently walk down to the local McDonalds and use their fucking wifi network to install their software. They're a company that caters specifically to aerospace and automotive industries!
...no, I'm not bitter...
Anyways, other than that... it's been good enough. The product is solid. The company tech support is dicks. The product certainly makes life a lot easier around here. Especially for me, who is mainly just 'stuck' with this role temporarily, and would very much rather not be doing the drawing-ballooning/bubbling for quality reports.
