Our pricing changed this week. Here is the new model, line by line

Nine days ago we published our full price list and made the case that a public price is a commitment. This week, that price list changed. When your differentiator is transparency, a pricing change is not something to slip quietly onto a page — it is something to explain, line by line, before anyone is paying it.

So here is the new model, what changed, and the reasoning.

The model now

€5,000 per year, per organisation — unchanged. The platform subscription still covers the whole pipeline: ingestion, Annex XIII validation, hosting, the public viewer, QR data carriers, registry submission, unlimited seats, ten-year in-EU retention.

Activation, now priced by battery category. €25 for an LMT battery — unchanged. €50 for an industrial battery above 2 kWh. €75 for an EV battery. One-off, per passport you activate, nothing for drafts.

Annual maintenance, per live passport — the new line. €5 for LMT, €10 for industrial, €15 for EV: exactly 20% of the activation price, the standard ratio for maintained software, billed once a year on the passports live at your subscription anniversary.

UK-billed customers pay the same figures in sterling.

Why activation now differs by category

Because a flat rate was quietly regressive. €25 is a material cost against a €400 e-bike battery and a rounding error against a €9,000 EV pack — the flat model charged our highest-volume, most price-sensitive buyer proportionally the most. Pricing to the category of the obligated object puts the weight where the value sits.

Why a maintenance fee exists at all

Because your obligation does not end when the passport is issued — and a pricing model should not pretend it does.

Under Article 77, the economic operator who places a battery on the EU market must keep its passport accurate, complete, accessible, and up to date. That is continuing language. The duty does not end at the sale, and it does not transfer to whoever buys the battery — a consumer reselling an e-bike, an EV changing hands, a storage asset being sold on: none of it moves the record obligation anywhere.

While that duty runs, this platform is what carries it: hosting, backup, retention, registry synchronisation, and — for industrial and EV batteries — the state-of-health data Annex XIII expects to stay current through the battery''s service life. The maintenance fee is that holding, priced at a fifth of activation per year. A model with no recurring line would either mean we stop carrying your record after year one, or that the cost is hidden somewhere else. We would rather print it.

When the fee stops

The fee tracks the regulation, in both directions. Maintenance applies to live passports only. When a battery is repurposed for a second life, that is legally a new placing on the market by a new operator — the original passport retires, and its fee stops. When a battery reaches end-of-life and recycling, the passport''s lifecycle ends — the fee stops, and archive retention stays included, free, for as long as retention obligations run. There is no charge for amending a passport and no charge per registry submission — we will not tax the compliance behaviour the platform exists to enable.

The arithmetic, updated

• 500 industrial batteries a year: €5,000 + (500 × €50) + (500 × €10) = €35,000 in year one.
• The maintenance line then grows with your live book — which is exactly the point. It reflects the record obligation you are actually carrying, and shrinks as batteries retire.

Why publish a price increase

The same reason we published the prices at all. Our buyer — the importer, the authorised representative, the smaller manufacturer — models the cost themselves and decides. A maintenance fee discovered on an invoice would be the opposite of everything we have said about pricing. This model went public before a single customer was paying the old one; nobody gets a surprise, and the worked examples on the pricing page now do the full arithmetic, recurring line included: see the pricing in full.