If you've searched for a Digital Product Passport consultant, you're probably staring at ESPR or the EU Battery Regulation and a deadline, and a consulting firm feels like the safe hand to hold. Some of that instinct is right — and some of it is about to cost you a five-figure project for reading documents and retyping values, work AI extraction now takes a first pass at while you approve each value.
We're not a consultancy, so we have no engagement to sell you. What we can do is tell you the truth about what these projects contain, because we built the software that automates most of it.
What a consulting engagement actually contains
Split a typical DPP consulting scope into its real tasks and most of it is data collection and field mapping — exactly what an automated pipeline does. The genuinely advisory parts are narrower than the invoice suggests.
| Task in the engagement | The honest verdict |
|---|---|
| Data — automatable Reading datasheets, certificates and test reports to find field values | The biggest line item, and pure data entry. AI extraction reads the same documents and suggests the values it can source, each with a confidence score and a link to the source — no person retyping PDFs, and what has no source can be requested from your supplier. |
| Data — automatable Chasing suppliers for the data you don't hold | Real work, but not advisory. A supplier portal sends each supplier a token-linked request for exactly the missing fields, with automatic reminders — no consultant inbox in the middle. |
| Data — automatable Mapping your data to the regulated field structure | Automatable. Per-category templates already encode the regulated field set (the full Annex XIII set for a battery, 160 for electronics); the pipeline maps values into them. The schema isn't a mystery a consultant decodes — it's published. |
| Advisory Confirming which regulation and category your product falls under | Genuinely advisory for edge cases. For a clearly-in-scope battery or textile it's obvious; for a borderline or multi-component product, a regulatory specialist earns their fee. Worth paying for — narrowly. |
| Advisory Legal sign-off and liability for what you declare | Advisory, and not something software replaces. The passport is your legal declaration. Whether you want external counsel to sign off is a risk decision — but it's a review of finished data, not a reason to hand over the data-collection too. |
When a consultant is still worth it
- Your product's classification is genuinely contested or novel and getting it wrong carries real liability.
- You need a PEF (Product Environmental Footprint) study — that's a specialist assessment, not a field a pipeline can invent, and the software simply attaches the result.
- You want external legal or notified-body sign-off on the finished declaration before publishing.
What it costs, roughly
A typical DPP gap-analysis-plus-implementation engagement runs in the four-to-five-figure range and takes weeks to months — most of it the data-collection work above. A PEF study, when you genuinely need one, is commonly €8,000–€25,000 on its own.
TracePass plans start at €49/month (Basic, ~9 AI extractions included) and €350/month (Starter, a €75 monthly AI budget). You keep the process and re-run it per product, instead of paying for the same data-gathering project every time you launch a SKU.
Skip the project. Fill the fields.
Upload the documents you already have and let the AI suggest values for the regulated fields it can source, each with a confidence score and a source link, for you to approve. Start free — no consultant, no card.
Start free