What does a digital product passport for tyres cost?

What you must do concretely

A cost overview with concrete amounts cannot be provided here. The ESPR (Regulation (EU) 2024/1781) describes in article 9 what a digital product passport must be capable of and what it must contain, but does not mention prices — those are determined by the market of service providers, and by how much work it costs your company to supply the data itself. What can be done here: list the cost items a product passport is probably made up of, and where companies often spend more time and money than expected.

What is expected of you

Supplying data that is correct and complete

The obligation that involves the most work is not the passport itself, but the data that must go into it. For a company of 10 to 100 employees, this usually means: designate someone who finds out which product data already exist (technical specifications, test reports, material composition) and which are still missing. That is a different task for an importer who sources tyres from multiple manufacturers than for a manufacturer who already has its own production data centrally stored. The costs are mainly in internal hours, not in an invoice from a supplier.

A data carrier (QR code) on or with the product

Article 9 of the ESPR calls for a data carrier that refers to the passport. In practice, this is often the smallest cost item: adding a QR code to packaging, tyre or accompanying documentation is a production process adjustment, not an ongoing cost item. The bigger question is whether that QR code needs to be incorporated into existing print or label processes, and who coordinates that across multiple product lines.

Having the passport exist for ten years

A passport that is no longer accessible after two years has little use. Hosting, maintenance and security over a longer period are a recurring cost item, often in the form of a subscription to a platform. For a company of this size, this is usually not a matter of building and maintaining it yourself, but of outsourcing it to a party that has this as a core task — comparable to how accounting software or a CRM is procured.

Keep data up to date

A passport is not a snapshot. If a manufacturer updates a test report or an importer receives a new batch with different specifications, that change must be recorded somewhere. This is a process cost item: who is responsible for maintaining it, and how often does it happen? For companies with multiple locations, there is also the question of multiple locations of the same company being able to manage one passport, which can provide economies of scale compared to separate subscriptions per location.

Where things go wrong in practice

Underestimating the time to gather sources. Companies often budget only the subscription costs of a platform, and forget that assembling correct product data from multiple sources (manufacturer, own tests, import documentation) is the largest time investment.

Separate Excel files per product line. Without a central approach, separate files are created per tyre brand or size, managed by different people. That works until an update is needed, and nobody knows which version is the correct one anymore.

Not accounting for changes later. A passport is set up once and then not maintained, while specifications, test reports or suppliers change in the meantime. That results in a passport that no longer matches the physical product.

Ignoring costs of temporary uncertainty. Because the final date of the delegated act is not yet fixed, some companies wait with any preparation — and then have to set everything up in a short period afterwards, which is more expensive than staggered work. What can be done in the meantime is described on what you can already do while the rules are not yet final.

Choosing a platform without looking at the long term. A cheap basic subscription may turn out to be expensive later if data export, integration with your own systems, or hosting guarantees have not been included in your choice. What to pay attention to in that choice is worked out at what should I pay attention to when choosing a platform for the product passport.

What you can record

• An overview of existing product data per tyre line: which specifications, test reports and material data are already available, and which still need to be requested from the manufacturer or importer.
• A person responsible for maintaining the passport: who identifies changes in product data and who processes those in the passport.
• Agreements with suppliers or manufacturers about data supply: at what time and in what form they make product data available, so this does not have to be sorted out repeatedly.
• A copy of the supplied data outside the platform: so that your own administration is not entirely dependent on one external party. See also the considerations at must I keep a copy myself of the data contained in the product passport.
• A step-by-step plan for your own organisation: which departments (procurement, quality, logistics) are involved in supplying and maintaining data. An overview of those steps is at how do I approach the tyre product passport step by step.

Once the delegated act for tyres is published, this overview can be supplemented with more concrete cost items and any deadlines. Until then, it is mainly a matter of knowing which internal processes incur costs, regardless of which platform is used.