Free RAMS generators: when they’re the right answer, and where they stop

There are a lot of these now. Several are free outright, some charge a few pounds a document, and most will produce a usable method statement and risk assessment in about two minutes.

We make a compliance platform that costs money, so read the next bit with that in mind — but they’re real, they work, and for a decent number of jobs they’re the right thing to use. Here’s how to tell whether yours is one of them.

Use a free RAMS generator if

You write one or two RAMS a month and the job is genuinely routine. Standard trade activities, familiar hazards, no unusual interfaces. A generator with a good content library will get you 90% of the way and you’ll fix the rest in ten minutes.

Nobody’s asking you for anything beyond the RAMS. No ITPs, no permit regime, no quality records, no competence evidence with dates on it.

You’re a sole trader or very small firm, and the document is a gate you have to pass rather than a system you have to run. Paying a subscription for infrastructure you don’t need is a bad trade regardless of who’s selling it.

If all three are true, use the free one. That’s not us being gracious — it’s that the alternative is you paying us for something you won’t open.

The question that decides it

Here’s the thing worth understanding about all of these tools, including the good ones.

They start from a text box. You describe the job — the activity, the site, the hazards — and the AI writes a document around your description. That’s why they can afford to be free: they hold none of your project. There’s nothing to store, nothing to connect, no state.

And it means the quality of what comes out is capped by the quality of what you typed in. Which is fine for a routine job you could describe in your sleep. It’s less fine when the answer is in a specification you were sent — because reading the specification and turning it into your paperwork is the work. The typing was never the slow part.

So the question is: how much of your paperwork is written from what you know, and how much has to be extracted from documents somebody sent you?

The higher that second number, the less a describe-the-job tool can do for you — not because it’s a bad tool, but because you’re asking it about something it can’t see.

Where the free version stops

Four places, and they arrive in roughly this order as a firm grows.

The document that can’t be described from memory. An inspection and test plan is the clearest example. Every line comes out of a specification — clause references, acceptance criteria, hold points, notification periods. Free AI ITP generators do exist now, and they have the same shape as the RAMS ones — you type a description of the scope and a plan comes back. That holds up until somebody asks which clause an acceptance criterion came from, because the clause was in a document the tool never saw. We wrote a full guide to ITPs here.

Revision control that stands up. The design changes, the method changes, and eleven months later somebody asks which version was on site the day of the incident. A generated PDF in a downloads folder isn’t an answer to that.

The rest of the paperwork. Competence and expiry dates. Permits with actual authorisation behind them. Quality records with signatures on them. Every one of these bought separately is a separate login, and the interesting cost isn’t the subscriptions — it’s that none of them know about each other, so you assemble the evidence by hand every single time somebody asks.

The week before a renewal or an audit. This is where it actually bites. If the year’s evidence lives across six tools and three phones, proving what happened is a fortnight of archaeology. If it accumulated as you worked, it’s a search.

What we’d say if you asked us straight

If your paperwork is a document problem, buy a document tool — and the free ones are good enough that we’d rather say so than pretend.

If your paperwork is a system problem — the same job’s safety documents, quality records, competence and payment applications, all needing to agree with each other and survive being asked about a year later — then a document generator isn’t a small version of the answer. It’s a different category, and stacking six of them costs more than it looks.

That’s the line, honestly drawn. Most firms cross it somewhere between five and twenty people, usually the first time a main contractor asks for something that isn’t a RAMS.

If that’s you

Stathia is the compliance and commercial system for a subcontractor: the safety documents, the quality records — ITPs included — the competence, the timesheets and the payment applications on the same data, with AI drafting the first version from your scope, spec and drawings rather than from a text box.

Priced per project rather than per user, so putting your whole crew on it doesn’t cost you more. Seven days with every module open, no card.

Every draft is a draft. A competent person reviews and signs it. That’s true of us and it’s true of the free ones, and any product suggesting otherwise is one to walk away from.