Certification Costs – What It Really Takes
Certifications are one of the most confusing and stressful parts of developing a new product.
It feels overwhelming because you don’t know what certifications your product even needs, you don’t know when in the process you need them, and you don’t know how much they’re going to cost.
The truth is, the cost depends. It depends on your product, where you plan to sell it, and where you actually get the testing done.
So let’s walk through the different things that make up those costs. Once you understand the pieces, the total number at the end will make sense.
One of the biggest costs is lab testing. For FCC certifications, the important distinction is whether you’re using a pre-certified radio module or designing your own custom radio.
If you’re designing a custom radio, then your product is considered an intentional radiator. Those have to be tested in an FCC recognized lab, and those labs are more expensive.
But if your product doesn’t have a radio at all, or if you use a wireless module that’s already pre-certified, then you qualify for what’s called the SDoC route, the Supplier’s Declaration of Conformity.
In that case you can use an accredited lab, which tends to be cheaper.
Where you do the testing also makes a big difference.
Labs in the U.S. and Europe are typically more expensive, while testing in China is often much cheaper, sometimes just a fraction of the cost.
The trade-offs are things like communication, time zones, and sometimes turnaround time, and in general doing anything in China is almost always cheaper but also usually slower.
But if cost is your biggest concern, China can be a much more affordable option.
Another way to control costs is through pre-compliance testing, which is basically early testing before your design is finalized.
The benefit here is that it lets you catch problems before you’re locked into too many design decisions.
For example, you might run pre-compliance tests on a bare board without the finished enclosure, just to see if there are any EMI issues that need to be solved early.
If you’re using a simple microcontroller or a pre-certified module, pre-compliance may not be worth the money.
But if you’re building a complex custom design with your own radio or high-speed digital circuits, then early testing can save you from a disaster later.
You don’t want to wait until the very end, get the entire product tested, and then find out it fails when you’re stuck with months of redesigns.
Even with pre-compliance, there’s always the risk of failures and retesting. This is where certification costs really spiral out of control.
If your product fails, you’re not just paying another lab fee. You’ll have to spin a new board, rebuild prototypes, and ship them back for testing.
EMI problems in particular are not straightforward. The lab won’t tell you what on your PCB caused the issue, they’ll just tell you it failed.
And unlike debugging a functional problem, you can’t just hook up an oscilloscope and easily spot the culprit.
So you might end up rerouting ground planes, adding filters, or changing the enclosure, and you won’t know for sure if it’s fixed until you pay for another test.
This is why designing for compliance from the very beginning is so important. Once you’re stuck in the fail and retest cycle, the costs and delays pile up fast.
Certifications also come with a mountain of paperwork. Test reports, technical files, declarations of conformity.
And yes, the labs charge you for this too.
It feels a little crazy to pay hundreds of dollars just for someone to shuffle papers, but that’s part of the process, and it’s not been replaced by AI just yet – or maybe it has but they still charge you the same for it.
The exact type of certifications your product needs is of course the biggest cost driver.
One of the main types is testing for electromagnetic interference. In the U.S. that’s done through the FCC, and in Europe it’s CE.
This testing makes sure your product isn’t interfering with other devices and that it can handle interference itself.
It’s often the most expensive category, especially if you’re designing a custom radio. If you use a pre-certified module, you avoid a lot of that cost and risk.
Another big category is safety testing. If your product plugs into AC mains, then you should expect significant safety certification costs.
UL is one of the most common standards in the U.S., though there are IEC and other options that may apply depending on your market.
For products powered by batteries, especially lithium-ion, there are also safety certifications. The simplest path is to use a pre-certified battery pack.
If you do that, you’re mostly covered, but if you create your own custom pack, then you’re looking at much more testing and much higher costs.
Environmental certifications also add to the bill. These include things like RoHS and WEEE in Europe. RoHS restricts hazardous substances in electronics, and WEEE is for electronic waste.
In the U.S. it’s more of a patchwork, with California requiring RoHS compliance and some other states having their own rules.
Environmental certifications are generally more about documentation than lab time, so they’re not as expensive as EMI or safety, but they still add costs and complexity.
And keep in mind that medical devices or industrial equipment often require a whole other set of certifications beyond what we’ve talked about here, which can add even more cost and complexity.
Certifications aren’t global. Passing FCC doesn’t mean you’re automatically cleared for Europe, and passing CE doesn’t cover Canada or Japan. Each region has its own requirements.
The smart move is to start with a single region, usually either the U.S. or Europe.
Once you’ve passed in one of those markets, you can start selling and generating revenue, then use that momentum to expand into other regions later.
The good news is that if your product can pass FCC or CE testing, it will probably pass in most other regions too, often with little or no design changes required.
Now let’s talk about some real numbers.
If your product doesn’t have a custom radio, or if it uses a pre-certified wireless module and a pre-certified battery pack, then certification costs usually fall in the range of about three thousand to eight thousand dollars.
That’s where most simpler products end up.
If your product does have a custom radio, or a custom battery pack, or multiple advanced features, then costs can climb much higher.
For those kinds of products, it’s not unusual to see certification costs go well over fifty thousand dollars.
That’s why product simplicity is so critical if you’re working with a limited budget.
But don’t let these numbers scare you away. You can delay most certification costs until late in development, as long as you’ve been designing with compliance in mind from the start.
And you don’t necessarily have to pay for certifications out of your own pocket. One of the best ways to fund certifications is to pre-sell your product.
You can run a Kickstarter campaign, or take pre-orders directly on your website, and then use that money to pay for certifications and your first round of manufacturing.
That’s exactly how many successful hardware startups do it, and it’s the approach I recommend.
