---
title: DPP consulting — before you hire one, read this
description: Thinking of hiring a DPP consultant? What an engagement actually does, what it costs, and which parts are just field-filling that software automates.
canonical: "https://www.tracepass.eu/dpp-consulting"
locale: en
source: "https://www.tracepass.eu/dpp-consulting"
---

# DPP consulting — before you hire one, read this

> Thinking of hiring a DPP consultant? What an engagement actually does, what it costs, and which parts are just field-filling that software automates.

TracePass doesn't sell consulting — we make the software that fills the passport. So here's an honest breakdown of what a DPP consulting engagement actually delivers, what it costs, and which parts you can skip entirely with an automated pipeline.

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 work a pipeline does in an afternoon.

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 | Advisory / Data — automatable | The honest verdict |
| --- | --- | --- |
| Reading datasheets, certificates and test reports to find field values | Data — automatable | The biggest line item, and pure data entry. AI extraction reads the same documents and fills the fields with a confidence score and a link to the source — no person retyping PDFs. |
| Chasing suppliers for the data you don't hold | Data — automatable | 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. |
| Mapping your data to the regulated field structure | Data — automatable | Automatable. Per-category templates already encode the regulated field set (94 for a battery, 166 for electronics); the pipeline maps values into them. The schema isn't a mystery a consultant decodes — it's published. |
| Confirming which regulation and category your product falls under | Advisory | 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. |
| Legal sign-off and liability for what you declare | Advisory | 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 for manual entry and €350/month for AI-assisted extraction. 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.