How much does supplement compliance cost per SKU per year?

The two costs that repeat every year

Per SKU, per year, two figures repeat regardless of which retailer or marketplace is asking: a TIC provider reviewing a current Certificate of Analysis, roughly $80 to $120 per product from published provider price sheets, or, only when no current COA exists, a lab running fresh finished-product testing, roughly $500 to $1,000per product from published third-party lab price sheets. Nothing else in a typical year is a fixed, recurring compliance cost at the SKU level; everything else (a facility’s cGMP certificate, a quality agreement, insurance) is priced and renewed at the account or facility level, not per SKU.

Cost figures last verified 2026-07-24, from published TIC provider and third-party laboratory price sheets. They are configuration, not constants: providers change their pricing.

How often it recurs

The document-age window this product’s configuration applies is 182 days (see how long a COA stays valid for where that number comes from and why sources disagree on it). Dividing a year by that window, 365 by 182, works out to about 2 renewal cycles a year per SKU. That is arithmetic on the window, not a separately published renewal-frequency figure.

Both rows are the same arithmetic, cost per cycle times 2cycles, applied to the two ends of the config range. A real year for a real SKU lands somewhere between these two bounds depending on how many of that SKU’s renewals arrive on time; this article doesn’t invent a blended “typical” figure, since how many renewals land on time is specific to each brand’s manufacturer relationship, not a constant.

What a late renewal costs, once

The gap between the two rows above, $380 to $920 per missed cycle, is the cost of the same SKU’s paperwork being late rather than on time. It recurs only when a renewal is missed, so it isn’t a fixed annual cost the way the review cost is; it’s what’s avoidable.

Multiplied across a catalogue, the same arithmetic scales linearly: nothing about reviewing five SKUs is cheaper per SKU than reviewing one. At a five-SKU catalogue, review-only lands at $800 to $1,200 a year; at 11 SKUs it’s $1,760 to $2,640. Both figures are the same per-SKU number from the table above multiplied by SKU count; there’s no volume discount built into the TIC review or retest cost itself.

What a consultant costs instead

A regulatory consultant is $150 to $500 an hour. A consultant is typically paid for judgment: reviewing a quality agreement, or interpreting a requirement that doesn’t have a clean numeric answer. They are not paid for the recurring TIC review or retest cost above, which goes to the provider or lab directly whether or not a consultant is involved. The two costs are additive, not substitutes for each other.

What a subscription costs, and what it doesn’t replace

A subscription is priced by the number of products a brand actively manages, in as many markets as it sells into, and it doesn’t pay the TIC provider or the lab on a brand’s behalf. Its job is keeping renewals inside the document-age window often enough that the review cost applies instead of the retest cost. The first 1 product is free and never expires, so the arithmetic below starts at the second.

Per-product figures are the plan’s monthly price for a year divided by the number of products it covers, including the free one; a brand running fewer products than a plan covers pays more per product than shown, which is exactly why the cheaper plan below is the right one until the break-even. Growth becomes cheaper than Starter from the 7th product. Scale becomes cheaper than Growth from the 36th product. Markets are never counted, and every plan includes every feature. Annual billing takes 15% to 20% off, depending on the plan. See pricing for the live figures and for monthly billing.

Putting the two together

The subscription and the TIC/lab cost are separate line items that scale with SKU count in different ways: the subscription by how many products are actively managed, the TIC/lab cost by cycle and by how many renewals land on time. A brand paying the low end of both, Growth at 11 products ($316 per product per year) plus every renewal landing inside the window ($160 to $240per SKU per year), is paying for the review cost either way; the subscription’s return is avoiding the $380 to $920 retest gap, not avoiding the review cost itself.

• The TIC review/retest cost exists whether or not a brand pays for any software: it's paid to the provider or lab, not to this product.
• A subscription's cost follows the number of products actively managed, never the number of markets they sell into.
• A consultant's hourly cost is additive to both of the above, not a replacement for either.

Run the free check to see where your own SKUs currently sit against the document-age window before estimating which side of this arithmetic applies to your catalogue. Related: how TIC verification works and what it costs and how long a COA is valid for Amazon.