If you run customer programs at a co-manufacturer, every traceability conversation eventually becomes a pricing conversation, and every pricing conversation eventually becomes an account-review line item. So here is our pricing philosophy, stated plainly enough to take into an account review — including the part most vendors put in the meter's fine print.
The perverse incentive in metered capture
A traceability record is worth exactly as much as it is complete. A record that captures the events somebody judged worth paying for is not a record; it is a sample, biased by that judgment. And per-event pricing guarantees that judgment happens. Someone in plant IT gets asked to cut the events bill, and the optional events go first — the aggregation events, the second read-point, the exception captures — which are precisely the events a trace-back or a customer audit needs.
Metered capture taxes the behavior the record depends on. That is not a pricing quibble; it is an architecture defect expressed in dollars.
The worked comparison
Take a model co-manufacturer account — one plant, one demanding QSR customer, case-level encoding on the customer's program. The numbers are illustrative and the structure is what matters.
| Per-event pricing | Free capture, paid answers | |
|---|---|---|
| Case-level commissioning events, 14M cases/yr | 14M × $0.002 = $28,000/yr | $0 |
| Aggregation events (case→pallet), 700k/yr | $1,400/yr — and the first line cut when the bill is challenged | $0 |
| Second read-point at shipping | Usually never turned on: it doubles the meter | $0 — turned on, because there is no reason not to |
| What the record looks like at audit | The events someone decided to afford | Everything the line emitted |
| What you pay for | Volume — completeness is the cost driver | Answers: traces, custody evidence, seats, and per-customer sharing grants |
| The number you defend at the account review | An events bill that grows when the customer's program succeeds | A per-account capability cost, sized to the account it retains |
The right-hand column is ours. Recording an event is free; what is bounded and computed stays free. Revenue attaches where value is actually consumed: the trace somebody runs, the custody evidence somebody shows an auditor, the seat somebody works from, the grant that gives one customer a scoped view of one plant's record. The meter — where there is one — sits on answers and authority, never on capture.
The honesty block
The zero deserves precision, because it is the largest promise on this page. Our intent is that recording an event never costs money — permanently. No published terms back that sentence today, so read it as a commitment we are making, not one you can yet enforce against us. When prices are published, this page will carry the terms — or it will say we changed our mind. We would rather state the intent with that qualifier than state a perpetual guarantee nothing binds.
The cost-to-serve math
Your budget logic is the most honest in the industry: traceability spend at a co-manufacturer is justified by keeping or winning an account, never by an internal-ROI fiction. Free capture is what makes that math work. The record accrues at zero marginal cost across every line and every customer program — your mandate arrives from the brand owner's programme office, and the Sunrise 2027 brand-owner read is where that mandate gets decided — and the paid unit is the per-customer answer: this account gets a scoped view of its own products' events, priced against what this account is worth. One record, N customers, N grants. The paperwork those customers already demand — the purchase order, the ASN — joins the same record, which is the trace-carries-its-paperwork argument in full.
Compare that to the alternative you have been offered before: join the customer's network, pay to emit into their system, and repeat per customer. That model prices each account's compliance separately and owns your record collectively. The free-capture model inverts both.
The question to ask any vendor
Where does the meter sit, and what does it discourage? If the meter sits on capture, it discourages completeness, and completeness is the product. If the meter sits on answers, it discourages nothing you care about at the plant — an unqueried event costs nobody anything, and the queried event is the one delivering value to a named account. Ask the question in exactly that form and watch which vendors have an answer.
When the next mandate with a date on it lands, get started. The interview branches for co-manufacturers and suppliers, and its questions are the cost-to-serve facts: which customer told you to send event data and what the mandate actually said, how many customer formats you are maintaining right now, and what your MES or WMS emits.