The amount you pay for this monitoring is never a fixed rate that applies equally to everyone. It depends on how many product categories you have monitored, in how many EU countries you are active, and whether you only want to receive an alert or have it integrated with your own dossier. The core of the service — the weekly scanning of Safety Gate publications for signals that affect your assortment — is therefore customized work, and that customization determines the price.
What that monitoring always does is the same: filter the public database of the European Commission by the categories relevant to you, so you don't have to manually browse through hundreds of notifications from all member states every week. The question "what does that cost" is really the question "how much of that filtering work does my business need".
What Safety Gate itself costs
Safety Gate, the successor to the former RAPEX system, is a public database maintained by the European Commission. Everyone can consult the publications in it free of charge, without an account and without a subscription. That part costs nothing and never will — it is a government service, not a commercial product.
What is not free is the work around it: scanning every week which of those publications affect your product categories, tracing that back to your own assortment, and delivering the result in a way that you can act on it immediately. This is the part for which a subscription is charged, and the price depends on the scale at which you need it.
What determines the price
Three factors play the largest role. First, the number of product categories you have monitored: an online shop with three categories requires less filtering work than an importer with twenty brands in as many subcategories. Second, the number of countries: publications are filed under the authority of the member state that submits them, and the more markets you serve, the wider that monitoring must reach. Third, the integration with your own dossier: do you only want a notification in your inbox, or should a relevant publication automatically be routed to the complaints register and the compliance system you already have in place.
A fourth factor is less visible but does count: how many users within your organization need access. A sole proprietor with one product line has different needs than a company where procurement, compliance, and management all want to be involved.
Monitoring yourself or having it done
Nothing requires you to outsource this monitoring. The publications are public, and anyone with the time to search weekly on the relevant keywords and categories themselves can do it just as well. For a business with one or two products in a stable category, it is often a matter of a quarter hour per week.
Where it becomes harder to do yourself is with a broader or changing assortment: multiple brands, changing suppliers, or sales in multiple member states at the same time. Then the search work itself becomes a cost item, even if there is no invoice for it.
How this relates to the rest of your dossier
A publication found is rarely the endpoint. If a similar product is recalled or blocked elsewhere in the EU, the immediate question is what that means for your own risk analysis and technical documentation. That is why monitoring works most effectively when it is integrated with the dossier that already contains those documents, rather than disappearing as a loose message in an inbox.
If you first want to know whether this monitoring is relevant at all for your role in the supply chain, you can determine that with a few questionsquickly. The background on how publications are traced back to the official source is described in the page on our methodology, and an overview of what is included per subscription type can be found in the current price overview.
Whether monitoring is prudent in your situation depends on your role and product range. You can check this for free and without an account via the quick scan, or by first reading the detailed topics in the knowledge base.