Subscriptions

Stop buying standards one at a time. An iTeh Subscription unlocks broad collections of standards — entire issuing-body catalogs, or focused ICS scopes — for a flat monthly or annual price, and grants your whole team in-browser annotation through the Engineering Workplace.

This page is the practical guide: what you get, what to choose, and how the day-to-day works.

What a subscription unlocks

While your subscription is active, every reader on a seat gets:

Unlimited reading of every standard within the subscription's scope — directly in the browser, no per-document fee.
The Engineering Workplace markup layer — highlight clauses, draw redlines, drop text notes, and share annotations with your team. See the Engineering Workplace guide for the full feature set.
Newer editions automatically — when a standard you're reading publishes a new revision, you read the new revision as part of the same subscription.

What it does not include: print, download, or "save as" — standards licensing prevents redistribution, so the platform is read-only by design.

Choosing a scope

Subscriptions are scoped to a single entity. You pick the entity when you subscribe:

Entire body collection

Subscribe to a body (ISO, IEC, EN, ASTM, SIST, …) and you unlock every standard the body publishes that's available on the platform. Best when:

Your team works across topics.
You'd rather pay one predictable price than chase dozens of small invoices.
You audit, certify, or design against a body's full catalog (for example, an ISO 9001 / ISO 14001 / ISO 45001 program).

Specific ICS classification

Subscribe to a single ICS code and you unlock every standard that's classified under that code — across every body. Best when:

Your work is concentrated in one industry niche (welding, EMC, aerospace, cybersecurity, medical devices, …).
You want to keep monthly cost as low as possible.
You don't want to wade through standards outside your scope.

You can hold multiple subscriptions under the same account — one account can subscribe to ISO and a couple of niche ICS codes at the same time. Annotations are isolated per subscription, so each workspace stays clean.

When in doubt

Open the body or ICS page in the catalog and look for the Subscribe panel. The platform will show you the price for that exact scope, the number of seats you're buying, and any volume discounts that apply, before you check out.

Personal vs. business accounts

A subscription belongs to an account.

Personal account — you're the only reader. The Engineering Workplace runs in private mode (no "share" concept; nobody else can open the same subscription anyway).
Business account — multiple users in your organization can read on the same subscription, and the Engineering Workplace gains team features (publish annotations to colleagues, see what they've shared).

You decide which account a subscription belongs to at checkout. You can hold both kinds at the same time.

Seats and concurrency

Each subscription has a number of seats. A seat is a concurrent reader slot — one seat lets one person read at a time, two seats let two read at once, and so on.

The seat count is what you set at checkout (default 1, no upper limit short of "the size of your team").
Volume discounts kick in automatically — the more seats, the lower the per-seat price.
You can grow seats later by editing the subscription from Account → Subscriptions → Manage.

Practical sizing: count the people who routinely read standards and add a small buffer. Most teams settle around "engineers ÷ 2" because not everyone reads at once.

Monthly vs. annual

Two billing intervals, your choice when you subscribe and editable later:

Monthly — pay each month, change scope or cancel any time. Best while evaluating or for short-term projects.
Annual — pay once a year for a noticeably lower effective price. Best when you've decided this is part of how your team works.

Switching between intervals is supported from the manage screen. There's no early-termination penalty either way.

Day-to-day workflow

Find the standard through search, the catalog, or your bookmarks.
The viewer loads the document along with the Engineering Workplace side panel and toolbar.
Read, highlight, draw, take notes — your annotations save automatically (typically within a second of finishing the edit).
On a business subscription, click the lock icon next to any of your annotations to publish it to teammates. Click the people icon to take it back to private.
Reopen the standard tomorrow, next week, or next year — your annotations are exactly where you left them.

Billing

Currency — billed in your account's currency.
Method — credit card via Stripe.
Invoices — every charge generates an invoice you can download from Account → Subscriptions → [your subscription] → Invoices.
Renewal — automatic at the end of each billing period unless you cancel.
Failed payment — Stripe retries on its standard schedule; you'll receive an email if a payment ultimately fails. Reading is paused until the issue is resolved.

Cancelling, pausing, expiring

Cancel anytime from the manage screen. Reading continues until the end of the current period; you're not charged for the next.
After expiry, you lose access to the standards. Your annotations are kept in our database — if you renew (or rejoin the organization that owns the subscription), they reappear exactly as before.
We do not silently purge annotation work when a subscription ends. Annotations are precious; lost work would be a worse user experience than a stale row in our database.

Changing scope

Need to switch from "ISO whole catalog" to "just ICS 13.040 — air quality"? Open Account → Subscriptions, cancel the old one, and subscribe to the new scope. Both subscriptions can run at the same time during the transition; you only pay for what you have active.

Annotations made under one subscription do not automatically appear under another, even if the same standard is covered — each subscription has its own isolated workspace.

Frequently asked

Can a single subscription cover everything we read? If your team's reading lives mostly inside one issuing body, yes — one body subscription covers that body's entire catalog. Teams that span bodies usually run two or three subscriptions in parallel; that's still dramatically cheaper than per-document pricing.

What happens if a standard I rely on hasn't been added to the platform yet? Let us know. We add and refresh standards on a continuous basis, and direct demand from a subscriber gets prioritized.

Can I share my login with a colleague to save on seats? No. Seats exist for exactly that reason — they're inexpensive and unlock the per-user features (your own annotation namespace, audit trails, billing visibility).

Will my team see my private annotations? No. On a business subscription, annotations stay Private by default. Only annotations you explicitly publish (one click on the lock icon) are visible to colleagues.

Does the subscription cover printed copies? No. Subscriptions are for in-browser reading and annotation only. For a paper edition, purchase the printed document separately from the catalog page.

What if I need to cite or quote from a standard in a document? Standards licensing allows ordinary citation (a clause number, a short exact quote with attribution) but not redistribution. For larger excerpts, contact the issuing body.

Can my subscription be transferred when I leave the company? A subscription belongs to its account, not the user. If you bought it under your personal account, it's yours. If your company's business account holds it, it stays with the company.

Tips

Start monthly, switch to annual when you're sure. Most teams realize within 60 days how much they actually use the platform.
Subscribe wide, prune later. A body subscription is cheaper to pick up than to lose six months later because it turned out you needed a single niche ICS code.
Use seats accurately. Buying one seat for a five-person team defeats the licensing and risks suspension. Volume discounts mean the marginal seat is inexpensive.
Lean on the Engineering Workplace. A subscription that's used for review and shared annotation is worth dramatically more to your team than one that's just used as a faster way to read.

Get started: browse the catalog or pick an ICS classification and click Subscribe.