DPP consultant or software — which do you actually need?
This is the question most companies hit about a week after they accept the obligation is real. A consultancy will tell you the answer is a consultant. A software vendor will tell you the answer is software. We sell both, which is either the worst possible position from which to advise you or the only useful one — so here is the honest version, including the cases where you should not buy anything from us.
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In one line: a consultant is right when the hard part is figuring out what is true; software is right when the hard part is keeping it true — and because a passport is a living record for up to 15 years, most companies with a real obligation end up needing both.
When a consultant is genuinely the right call
There are situations where buying software first is simply the wrong order:
You do not yet know whether you are in scope. If the honest answer to “which of our products carry an obligation, and when” is “we are not sure”, that is a question of interpretation, not tooling. Getting it wrong in either direction is expensive: building passports you do not need, or missing ones you do.
Your supply chain is genuinely opaque. If nobody internally knows who makes your cells, or your supplier relationships run through a trading company, the first job is investigative. Software will happily send data requests into a void.
You have no internal owner. Compliance projects fail when nobody owns them. If you cannot name the person, a consultant temporarily is that person — and that is a legitimate reason to hire one.
It is genuinely one-off. Rare, but real: a single legacy product line being wound down, where nothing needs maintaining afterwards.
When software is the right call
The obligation repeats. Every new model, variant and batch needs its own record. A consultant who produces a beautiful spreadsheet for this year’s range has solved this year.
The data already exists in your documents. If your spec sheets, test reports and declarations of conformity are in reasonable order, the work is extraction and mapping — which is exactly what tooling is good at and what expensive consultant hours are wasteful for.
You need to chase many suppliers. Twenty suppliers × forty fields is an administrative process, not an intellectual one. Chasing it by email is how deadlines get missed.
The record has to stay live. This is the one that decides it for most people, and it gets its own section below.
The structural reason most companies need both
A consultant’s deliverable is a document: an assessment, a data model, a gap analysis, a set of populated fields as at a date. That is genuinely valuable, and it is the fastest way to go from confusion to clarity.
But a product passport is not a document. It is a resolvable record that must stay reachable and current for the product’s regulated lifetime — for batteries, up to 15 years. It has to answer a QR scan in year seven. It has to reflect a component change in year three. It has to survive your consultant’s engagement ending, your staff turning over, and in the extreme, your software vendor going out of business. A PDF cannot do any of that, and neither can a spreadsheet on a shared drive.
So the honest shape of the decision is usually sequencing rather than either/or: expert help to establish what is true, then a system to keep it true. Where companies waste money is paying consultant day-rates for the keeping-it-true half, or buying a platform before anyone has established what is actually in scope.
It is also worth asking any consultant a blunt question before signing: what happens to this deliverable when it goes out of date, and who updates it? A good one will have a clear answer. So will a good vendor asked what happens to my passports if you disappear?
What this costs, in both directions
We publish our prices, which makes the comparison concrete. Software subscription runs €79–€719 per month depending on volume, with no setup fee and a free 21-day pilot. Expert delivery is priced as fixed engagements rather than day rates: an Automated Gap Report at €99 (AI-only, no human review, an explicitly indicative first pass), a verified Gap Report at €1,900 over ten working days, a Passport Sprint at €4,900 for one product family, and a Passport Launch at €9,500 where we also chase your suppliers.
Independent consultancy for this work is typically sold at day rates, and a scoping engagement of a few days will usually land somewhere between the Gap Report and the Sprint. That is not an argument against hiring one — it is an argument for knowing which half of the problem you are paying to solve.
The cheapest possible first step, whoever you eventually buy from, is to find out how big the gap actually is. Run the free readiness check, or check your documents against the complete field list — published free as JSON and CSV under CC BY 4.0, no sign-up, no obligation to talk to anyone. If it turns out you already hold most of the mandatory fields, you need far less help than anyone will try to sell you.
Frequently asked questions
Do I need a DPP consultant?
You need one if the hard part is establishing what is true: whether you are in scope, who your actual suppliers are, or who internally owns the obligation. You do not need one if your data already exists in documents and the work is extraction, mapping and supplier chasing — that is administrative volume, and paying day rates for it is expensive.
Can software alone make me compliant?
Software makes the record exist, stay current and stay resolvable. It cannot decide whether you are in scope, and it cannot conjure data your suppliers have never produced. If those two things are settled, software alone is genuinely sufficient. If they are not, you are buying a project rather than a licence.
Why can a consultant’s deliverable not be the passport?
Because a passport is a live record, not a document. It must answer a scan and reflect product changes for the regulated lifetime — up to 15 years for batteries — long after any engagement ends. A gap analysis as at a date is valuable, but it is not the thing the regulation asks you to maintain.
What is the cheapest way to find out where I stand?
The free readiness check, or checking your own documents against the published field list, which is free and needs no sign-up. If you want a written assessment, our Automated Gap Report is €99 — AI-only with no human review, so it is an indicative first pass rather than a verified assessment, and it upgrades into the verified €1,900 version.