ISO standards commonly refer to other standards for more details. Then you also need technical reports which are also pay walled to get a sense of practical application. It very quickly adds up and there is no way to "explore" which documents are really applicable to your company and products.

And to top it off most of these licenses under which you buy them only allow for a single digital copy (one person).

As mentioned above, if it few $524 per document, and you don't know how many documents you will need to consult in order to comply with the standards and at the end you need to buy the relevant document ... It's tricky. Standards are like laws. The law shouldn't be pay-walled.

For one or two standards? There's just the headache of getting approval to spend the money.

But when it gets to dozens/hundreds, plus requiring vendors to have their own copies, it quickly multiplies into a massive burden. And that's not even getting into the open source issues.

Not to mention the fact that you might not know if you NEED the ISO until after you've already bought it.

Any kind of positive value is bad if we are discussing the price of an open standard.