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As described:StopNarrowed:Narrow

No as described. Go only as EAA monitoring and evidence for EU web agencies.

web agencies · ~$200/month per agency account · last reviewed (next review by 29 Dec 2026) · 34 cited sources

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5. Pre-Mortem: It's September 2028 and AccessCheck Is Dead

Three most likely causes of death, ranked by probability. They compound: #1 makes #2 worse, because buyers without urgency shop on price.

Cause #1: No urgency, so nobody buys monthly (probability ~45% of failure cases)

What happened. Enforcement stayed where it was in mid-2026: notices, complaints, a few court orders against big French retailers, and no well-known fines. The Auchan appeal dragged on. Agencies liked the demo and said "our clients will act when someone gets fined." The ones who paid ran one cleanup, sent one report, and cancelled in month 3. MRR peaked at ~$1.5k and slid.

Early warning signs

  • Fewer than 3 of the first 20 agency calls agree to pay for a concierge report.
  • Prospects ask "has anyone actually been fined?" in most calls.
  • Month-3 retention below 70%, with "we've fixed it now" as the cancel reason.
  • Agencies buy for one client, not their whole book.
  • Your enforcement-tracker posts get more traffic than your product pages, but no trials.

Fixable? Partly. You can't make regulators move. You can:

  • sell the agency's recurring care plan, not the client's fear, so the agency has its own reason to keep paying;
  • anchor on regressions (every site change can add new errors) so there's always something new each month;
  • launch where enforcement is most visible (Germany's warning letters, the French court cases, the Dutch ACM requests);
  • keep costs low enough to wait for enforcement to catch up.

Cause #2: Squeezed between free and enterprise (probability ~35%)

What happened. Buyers compared you with Pope Tech ($25–225/mo), WebYes ($29/mo), Equalize Digital ($2,250/yr for 25 sites) and free axe DevTools. Your scans were the same axe-core results in a different layout. You cut prices to €49 to win deals, and the maths stopped working: 200+ accounts needed for $10k at 15 hrs/week. Upmarket, every serious lead was already in a Siteimprove or Level Access process. WebYes added a multi-client agency view and a French statement template in 2027.

Early warning signs

  • Win/loss notes say "cheaper elsewhere" more than "didn't need it".
  • Average revenue per account below €120 by month 9.
  • Agencies use you for the report but run their real checks in another tool.
  • A competitor ships an "EAA evidence" or country-statement feature.
  • Nobody uses the evidence file or the manual checklist, so only the scan is being used.

Fixable? Yes, if the differentiators are real. Price on what the others don't do: the evidence file, country-specific live statements, white-label reports and the care-plan resale kit. Track usage of those features weekly. If they aren't used, you are a scanner, and a scanner can't win on price.

Cause #3: A trust or liability event (probability ~20%)

What happened. An agency's client received a DGCCRF notice (or an Abmahnung, or an MLBF complaint) three months after your report showed "0 critical issues" on the scanned templates. The client's lawyer wrote to the agency, and the agency forwarded it to you, quoting a sales email that said "stay EAA-compliant". Your terms limited liability, but the story spread in an agency community. Two larger accounts left. Separately, the accessibility community on LinkedIn grouped you with overlays because your marketing used the same fear headlines.

Early warning signs

  • Any marketing, report or sales email uses "compliant", "certified" or "guaranteed".
  • Reports show a single score without "what we did not test".
  • You're asked to "confirm the site is EAA compliant" and nobody has a scripted answer.
  • No professional indemnity insurance by the first paying customer.
  • Your advisor isn't reviewing new copy.

Fixable? Yes, and cheaply, but only before it happens. Write the claims policy (07), put "what this report does not cover" on page 1 of every report, get insurance, and have the advisor sign off copy. After a public trust event, an "honest" brand does not recover easily.

Honourable mentions (less likely, still real)

  • Founder-market fit gap. If no one on the team has done accessibility work, the manual checklists and statement templates will be generic, and practitioners will notice. (Background not provided. See 09.)
  • Language and location. Selling to German or French agencies in English, from outside the EU, halves the call-to-customer rate.
  • Platforms move. Shopify, WooCommerce or WordPress ship stronger built-in accessibility checks, which removes the "scan" layer for their agencies.
  • Legal uncertainty. A higher court in France confirms the €250M threshold reading from the Auchan case, shrinking the French in-scope market.
  • Standards change. A new EN 301 549 aligned to WCAG 2.2 needs rule and template updates. That's manageable if you build on axe-core.