Initial costs are not the only costs
Creating a digital product passport is a one-time action: collecting data, verifying it and linking it to a QR code. However, the regulation also requires that the passport remains available for a number of years and that data is accurate as long as the product is on the market. This means that in addition to the setup, there are also ongoing costs for hosting, management and updating data. Anyone looking only at startup costs sees only part of the picture.
What determines those ongoing costs depends on three things: how long the data must remain available, how often something changes in a tyre model, and who actually carries out the management. Each of these factors affects the amount a company pays annually to maintain its passports.
Why hosting is a recurring expense
A product passport is not a standalone document that you store somewhere and then forget about. It must remain accessible via the QR code, even if a tyre is still in a warehouse or on a vehicle years later. This requires a server that is continuously accessible, protected against outages and failures, and scales as more tyre models are added. That technical side is usually the core of the recurring costs: not the one-time creation of a passport, but keeping it available for years to come.
How long that obligation lasts exactly is stated in the regulation itself. Companies that want to verify this precisely should consult the official text rather than relying on an estimate. In the knowledge base with the sources for each topic you can find where the provision is located in the official text for each question.
Changes to a tyre model count
A second factor that affects the amount is how often the underlying data changes. If a manufacturer changes something in the composition of a tyre model, a test report is replaced, or a new type approval is added, that must be reflected in the passport. Companies with a limited and stable range logically have less to deal with in this respect than an importer that carries dozens of models at the same time and regularly receives new batches.
This is also where the distinction between supplier and other parties in the chain becomes relevant: who supplies which data and who ultimately processes it determines in part how much work — and therefore costs — a change entails. More about that division of roles can be found on the page that provides answers to the most frequently asked questions about roles and obligations.
Managing yourself or outsourcing
The third factor is a choice: do you manage it in-house, or do you outsource hosting and updates to a party? In-house management requires someone to keep the data current and stay informed of changes in regulations. Outsourcing shifts that burden to a supplier, for a fixed fee. Neither approach is necessarily cheaper upfront; it depends on the size of your range and how much time an in-house solution would cost internally.
On the page with an overview of the rates and what they include you can see how tyrepas.eu has set up hosting for ten years and updating data. This gives a concrete picture of how an outsourced solution is structured, without saying anything about what is the best choice in your own situation.
What you can do with it already
Whether maintaining a product passport will be expensive or inexpensive cannot be stated in general beforehand: it depends on the number of models, the frequency of changes and the chosen management form. What can be done is to map out in advance how many tyre models your company carries and how often changes are made to them. This gives an initial indication of the scope of the management ahead of you.
Do you want to get that overview more clearly, then the product scan with a few short questions and an initial indication gives you a picture of where your company stands at the moment. This way you will quickly see whether maintaining a product passport for your situation is a minor matter, or something you want to take into account now.