Our Costs
We appreciate that to survive in the market place our service must be:
- Value for money
- Easy to use
- accurate
- credible in the market place and
- flexible to meet the needs of the individual user
The free calculator is designed generally for all land-based businesses and was developed using a grant from LEADER+. It provides users with a general estimate for their businesses free of charge with no registration or storage of data (thus reducing costs).
In order to generate revenue to keep this calculator up to date we have Google sponsored links and other adverts which will earn revenue for Cplan when users click on the link and visit the website of our sponsors (please note no pop-up adverts are accepted despite their ability to attract higher revenue as initial market survey indicated that like us our potential clients found them very annoying).
We estimate that currently only two sections of the land-based industry sector would be willing to pay to obtain a detailed carbon equivalent foot print for their business:
- Industry innovators – who want to be ahead of the game like us as they foresee the possibility of government or EU regulations enforcing some measure of compliance on their business and
- The near market sector – who can see an immediate benefit from selling their product to the public as carbon costed
We have therefore created a more detailed carbon equivalent calculator which takes farm specific data and calculates the total carbon equivalent emissions and sequestrations for each element of the business and returns a more precise picture of the impact management decisions can have on emissions/sequestrations
Taking the cost of alternative services and market demand into account we have set the price for this service at £85 + Vat. However:
We are also in the process of developing a certification scheme as this has been requested by the representatives of the near market sector.
We are working on the principle that if we can use data in the calculator which is already certified by other bodies there will be minimal duplication for the user and minimal manual checking by Cplan thus reducing costs for both parties (we are fundamentally opposed to another army of ‘inspectors’ arriving at the farm gate so we set out to create an industry and customer credible scheme).
We would welcome ideas from potential users in order to reduce costs involved in the accreditation process.