Identity
GTIN, batch or serial, the model, and the operator who answers for it. The half a customs system reads.
Digital Product Passport · GS1 Digital Link
A product passport your
competitors quote monthly.
Structured product data, in every language you sell into, behind a code that keeps resolving for the life of the thing it is printed on. 200 credits once, per passport. Nothing recurs, and there is nothing to cancel.
GS1-Conformant Resolver 1.2.0 · GS1 Web Vocabulary 1.18 incl. gs1:dpp · GS1 provisional DPP application standard GSCN 23-103 · UNTP 0.7.0 (draft)
Before anything else
Nothing you sell needs one today.
Batteries need one in February.
No ESPR delegated act has been adopted, so no product group carries an ESPR passport obligation right now. The EU registry went live on 20 July 2026 and six of the eight harmonised standards were published in May and cited in the Official Journal on 15 July, so the shape is finally settled. The obligations are not. We would rather tell you that than sell you a deadline.
The document
Not a landing page
with a compliance hat on.
Materials
Composition, recycled content, and substances of concern with where they sit. The last one is a recycler question, so it sits behind a key.
Repair
Repairability, where to get it fixed, which spare parts exist and for how long. The section that earns a second scan.
End of life
Recyclability, the pathway, take-back, and disassembly instructions for whoever actually does it.
Conformity
CE marking, declarations of conformity, certifications. Test reports for authorities only.
Documents
The PDFs: declaration of conformity, safety data sheet, repair manual. Hosted by us, not linked to a site that will be redesigned.
Four things
What the €9-a-month
passport apps do not do.
The code is a Digital Link, not a short link
The identifier has to be readable out of the URI itself, by a customs system that has never heard of us. That is the entire design of GS1 Digital Link, and the reason the guidance says not to print a shortener. Our resolver runs on its own host that serves Digital Links and nothing else, which is a decision we made for other reasons and which turns out to be the one that matters here.
The data is tiered, because the regulation is
Consumers see care, materials and recyclability. Repairers and recyclers get disassembly steps and where the substances of concern actually sit. Authorities get the test reports. One key per audience, labelled and revocable, and the restricted half is never in the document a public reader receives.
Every publish is archived, with its hash
EN 18221 asks for archived versions so a regulator can see what a product claimed then, not only now. Every publish freezes the bytes that were served and stamps them. Editing a published passport is free, and the archive still only grows when you decide it should.
A unit-level passport costs one credit
The passport is the data, charged once per product. A serialized unit beneath it is one credit, the same as any dynamic code. A hundred thousand individually addressable batteries is about $46 at the Volume rate. That is the band where per-code pricing stops being arithmetic and starts being a wall.
The number
200 credits, once.
Then nothing.
Drafting a passport is free. Publishing costs 200 credits, once, and every version after that is free, as is editing what a published passport says. A GS1 catalogue item, if you want the passport behind a real GTIN, is another 200. Scans are one credit, like every other code on the platform.
A hundred SKUs with passports is 40,000 credits: $59.60 once on the Growth pack, with 60,000 scans still in the wallet. The self-serve alternatives run $9 to $39 a month for 50 to 100 passports, and the closest GS1-native one is $15 a month for 100 codes. Those are yearly numbers. This one is not.
- ✓Unlimited languages per passport
- ✓Public, professional and authority tiers
- ✓Version archive with hashes
- ✓PDFs hosted, not linked out
- ✓schema.org, GS1 Web Vocabulary and UNTP output
- ✓Full export, free, whenever you want it
- ✓Ten years of resolution from the last publish
The honest scope
Things we will not tell you,
that somebody will.
- That your passport is ESPR compliant. No delegated act has been adopted for any product group, and compliance is the manufacturer's obligation in any case, not a vendor's to confer.
- That GS1 Digital Link is required by law. The ESPR is technology-neutral about carriers, and GS1's own April 2025 paper on DPP identifiers compares six identifier methods rather than asserting one. It is the method that fits a GTIN-bearing product, which is a different claim.
- That we have read EN 18219 and EN 18220, the standards on identifiers and on data carriers. They are behind a paywall, we have not bought them, and until we do we will not claim alignment with them or tell you what they permit. Any vendor quoting their contents at you either paid, or is repeating a blog.
- That you face fines of 4% of turnover. That figure has no basis in the ESPR and appears to have been borrowed from the GDPR. Penalties are national and range from about €1,500 to over a million depending on the member state.
- That micro-enterprises are exempt. They are not. The exemption people quote belongs to the unsold-goods destruction ban, which is a different rule.
- That we are certified. GS1 issues no certification for resolvers and there is no DPP conformity scheme yet; what exists is a free public test suite, which we run and publish.
Questions
Does my product need a Digital Product Passport?
Almost certainly not yet. As of today no ESPR delegated act has been adopted, so no product group carries an ESPR passport obligation. The first dated one is 18 February 2027, for batteries: every battery placed on the EU market needs a QR code from that date, and LMT, industrial over 2 kWh and EV batteries need the full passport. Detergents follow on 23 September 2029, toys on 1 August 2030, and textiles land somewhere around 2028 to 2029 once their delegated act is adopted. If a vendor tells you that you are already late, check which regulation they are quoting.
Is this compliant?
No one can honestly say yes, including us, because there is nothing yet to be compliant with. What we can say precisely: we run a GS1-Conformant Resolver to Standard 1.2.0, verified against GS1's own public test suite, carrying all sixty Web Vocabulary link types including gs1:dpp; we implement the GS1 provisional DPP application standard (GSCN 23-103, April 2025), which is provisional and says so on its first page; and we serve the passport as HTML, as GS1 Web Vocabulary JSON-LD, and as a UNTP 0.7.0 document, the last of which is a draft. Every one of those claims is something you can check yourself in an afternoon.
What happens when a rule changes, or when I need to correct something?
You edit the passport and the printed code follows. That is the entire argument for a resolver over a URL baked into artwork. Editing is free, including on a published passport, and every publish freezes what was served, with its hash, so a regulator can see what the product claimed in 2027 as well as what it claims today.
What if taproute disappears?
The regulation anticipates exactly this: a passport has to stay reachable even after the operator goes under, which is why a back-up through an independent third party is written into the ESPR. We are not your independent third party and will not pretend to be. What we do is make leaving costless: one button gives you the whole passport, every published version with its hash, and the attachments, in a file that needs nothing of ours to read. A published passport also keeps resolving for ten years from its last publish even if you never buy another credit.
Do I need a GS1 licence?
Not to publish one here. A passport we host gets its own address whether or not you hold a GTIN, so a brand with no GS1 licence can publish today and bind a GTIN later without republishing. On the wider question of which identifier schemes the EU standards accept, we will point you at what we have actually read: GS1's own April 2025 paper on unique DPP product identifiers compares six methods, its own Digital Link among them, and does not claim to be the only permitted one. EN 18219, the standard that settles it, is behind a paywall and we have not bought it, so we are not going to tell you what it says. If you do hold a licensed GS1 Company Prefix, register it and the passport prints as a proper Digital Link, which is the form retailers and customs systems already read.
Why not just point the QR at a page on my website?
Three things a marketing page cannot do. It cannot be registered in the EU DPP Registry, which went live on 20 July 2026 and stores the identifier and a pointer for every passport. It cannot carry a conformant Digital Link URI as the QR payload, and the guidance is explicit that a shortener or redirect service is not an acceptable substitute. And it cannot serve machine-readable data against the harmonised models, which is what a customs system or a recycler's software is actually asking for. A page is fine until roughly February 2027. After that it is a page.