What a compliant selection portal really costs (2026)
Every manufacturer ends up choosing between three options.
A "compliant selection portal" means: your catalogue online, guided product selection, sizing computed to the governing standard, and a quote or captured lead at the end. There are three ways to get one — and the sticker price is the least interesting number in each.
Self-build (internal team or dev shop)
Typical range €30k–150k, most projects landing around ~€85k, over 3–6 months elapsed. The quote covers the software. It never covers the regulatory content: someone must extract the standard's rules, encode them, prove them correct — and then maintain them internally, permanently, through every revision of the standard. That maintenance is a headcount commitment, not a line item, and it outlives the person who built the rules.
Generic configurator platforms
Setup fees of €3k–40k plus subscriptions of €8k–50k/yr — but the platform arrives empty. You author all product logic, all compatibility rules and all regulatory content yourself, and you maintain them yourself, forever. The tool is the cheap part; the empty rule shell is the expensive part. Add per-user fees, and the cost multiplies by every distributor you ever wanted to onboard.
A custodied vertical platform
One setup plus an annual license, priced on catalogue size and scope — with the regulatory logic held in custody by the provider: verified standards engines under versioned custody, hosting and support. Never priced per user, live in weeks. This is our model, published because we believe it survives the comparison.
The comparison, honestly drawn.
| Self-build | Generic platform | Custodied vertical platform | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Upfront | €30k–150k (typ. ~€85k) | €3k–40k setup | Scope-priced setup |
| Recurring | Internal maintenance headcount | €8k–50k/yr, often priced per user | annual license, never per user |
| Time to live | 3–6 months | Months of rule authoring | Weeks |
| Regulatory content | You build it, you maintain it | Not included — you author it | Included, verified, maintained |
| When the standard changes | Unscheduled internal work | Your team's problem | Custodied: updated, versioned, communicated |
| Who signs off the rules | Whoever built them | Whoever you assigned | Verified against the standard's own worked examples |
The numbers everyone forgets to quote.
Regulatory updates
Standards revise on their own schedule, not yours. Every revision of the governing standard is unscheduled work on paths 1 and 2 — and a compliance portal running on last edition's rules is worse than no portal: it is a liability with your logo on it.
Rule maintenance headcount
The engineer who encoded your rules will change roles or leave. On paths 1 and 2, the knowledge leaves with them. The industry's decades-old norm for maintained software is roughly a fifth of build cost per year — for compliance software, revisions make it lumpier and worse.
Distributor enablement
The portal only pays back when your channel uses it. Per-user pricing makes every distributor an incremental cost decision — which is precisely why enterprise tools never reach the channel, and why a licence that never counts seats is a structural feature, not a pricing gesture.
Which path fits whom.
Self-build fits manufacturers with a standing software team, a genuinely unique workflow, and the appetite to own regulatory maintenance as a permanent internal function.
Generic platforms fit products with little regulatory logic, where the catalogue and price rules are the whole problem and per-user economics don't have to reach a channel.
A custodied vertical platform fits manufacturers whose customers buy against a standard — where the regulatory content is the hard part, the channel needs access without a per-seat toll, and the fastest compliant answer wins the specification. That is the case we built for.