What does it cost to prepare an EUDR due diligence declaration?
There is no fixed fee for a due diligence statement, because the regulation prescribes no price and the costs depend on your own situation. What is certain: the price is determined by three factors that you can largely understand yourself. The number of product streams you want to declare, the risk classification of the countries of origin you work with, and the quantity and quality of the geodata you already have from your suppliers.
So it is not so much the question 'what does a statement cost' as 'how much work goes into substantiating it'. A single supplier with complete geodata costs less time and thus less money than ten suppliers spread across multiple countries with varying documentation. Whoever understands that difference can estimate the costs for their own business better than if you assume a single stray figure you read somewhere.
Where the amount comes from
A due diligence statement is the end result of a dossier: suppliers, countries of origin, parcels with geodata and the underlying documents. Each of those components costs time to gather and verify, and that time is the core of the cost price. With a simple product stream from one supplier and a low-risk country, that is straightforward. With cocoa or timber from multiple countries, with different suppliers per harvest season, the number of parcels and documents quickly adds up.
The risk classification of the country of origin also plays a role. A country that is classified as standard or high risk requires more extensive substantiation than a country with a low classification. This affects the time needed to complete the dossier, and thus the costs. If you want to get a picture of this in advance, you can answer a few questions to see which role and obligations apply to you, before you spend time on a dossier that may not be necessary.
What affects the amount of work
Three things determine in practice how much time, and thus money, a dossier costs. First, the number of product streams: each combination of raw material, country of origin and supplier counts separately. Second, the state of the geodata you receive from your suppliers — ready-made polygons save considerably compared to data you have to validate or enquire about yourself. Third, the retention requirement: documents must remain accessible for five years, and a dossier set up for that from the start costs less remedial work later than a dossier that has to be straightened out afterwards.
Anyone who contacts suppliers themselves for origin data will notice that requesting geodata sometimes goes faster than expected, and sometimes takes weeks because a supplier does not have the data on hand. That difference is not in the regulation but in your own supply chain, and it is one of the greatest uncertain factors in the ultimate time investment.
Do it yourself or have it built
You can compile a dossier yourself, or have it structured and validated. In either case, the legal risk assessment remains with you as a market participant or trader; a service can organize data and generate the statement, but does not express itself on whether a product is deforestation-free. That is an assessment you make yourself, possibly with a lawyer.
What a service like eudri.com can save you is the time you spend working out which documents, countries and parcels belong together, and drafting the statement yourself in the correct format. On the pricing page you can see how that is structured per product stream, and on the page about how it works you can read where the underlying information comes from. This gives you a realistic picture of what is involved, rather than a loose figure without context.
Putting costs in perspective
The cost of a due diligence declaration is therefore not a single figure, but the sum of the number of product streams, the risk classification of the countries, and the state of your geolocation data. If you want to make that clear for your own situation, it is advisable to first determine which role and obligation apply to you, and only then look at the scope of your file. On the knowledge base is explained by subject where the different obligations come from and what they mean in practice.
Do you want to know where your company stands before you start estimating costs? Take the free role check and then see which parts of a file are relevant for your product stream.