No Capex. Pay only for codes covered by your active campaigns. Every pack ready to promote, every day of the year.
The legacy approach charges for every code printed. We don’t. We supply the ACGs into your factory at no charge and bill only on the codes covered by an active promotion — the codes on packs in market during the campaign window — so you can code every pack, all year, without the bill that would normally come with it.
Free ACGs into your factory
No capital expenditure, no hardware purchase. We supply, install and service the units across your production lines as part of the engagement.
Pay only on active campaigns
You’re billed only on the codes covered by an active promotion — the codes on packs in market during the campaign window. Codes on packs outside any active campaign cost nothing. Validation, fraud monitoring and support are included.
Always promotionally ready
Because every pack already carries a code, you can launch a digital direct-to-consumer push in days — not the months a traditional supply-chain print cycle takes.
How the billing works
The commercial framework has two halves — both designed to align our incentives with yours.
1. The platform: free, included
We supply the ACGs, install them on your production lines, configure them to your printers and service them throughout the engagement. We run the cloud validation infrastructure on AWS, manage the fraud-monitoring systems and provide the Consumer Support Panel for your support teams. None of this is billed per-code or per-pack — it’s the platform you operate on. And every pack you produce can carry a unique code at no extra cost.
2. Printing: only the codes covered by an active campaign
We charge for the printing of unique codes only on the codes covered by an active promotional campaign — specifically, the codes on packs in market during the campaign window. Codes on packs that aren’t part of any active promotion cost nothing. Your print bill scales with the volume of codes you activate for promotions, not with the total codes printed. Our per-million printing rate is a fraction of what the legacy packaging-supplier route charges, and is tiered so larger campaigns benefit from a lower marginal rate.
A worked example. A brand produces 120 million packs per year, with every pack carrying a unique code (10 million per month). They run a single 2-month promotion. The codes on the 20 million packs that hit the market during those 2 months are billed at our printing rate. The remaining 100 million coded packs that year cost nothing. Run a second 2-month promotion later in the year and you’d pay on a further 20 million — total billed: 40 million from a 120 million annual production. The same 40 million coded packs at the legacy packaging-supplier rate would cost at least four times as much.
Why this matters. The legacy approach charges per coded pack regardless of whether those codes are part of any campaign. With us, you decide which production windows your promotions cover, and you only pay on those. We’ll share the full rate card in a tailored estimate — the calculator below shows the typical saving as a percentage.
The implication: being ‘promotionally ready’ 24/7
Because every pack already carries a code, you are never waiting for a print run to catch up with a marketing idea. A campaign that would traditionally take three to six months — design, brief the supplier, print run, supply chain, into store — can launch in days or even hours. That changes what marketing teams can actually do: real-time digital direct-to-consumer pushes triggered by an event (a sporting moment, a weather pattern, a competitor move), targeted regional pilots, fast experiments, sponsorship reactivation, and personalised rewards. None of these are practical when codes have to be planned and printed months ahead. They’re straightforward when every pack already carries one.
The savings story
The legacy approach — codes printed at the packaging supplier — typically costs between £3,000 and £5,000 per million coded packs, regardless of when those codes are used or whether they ever form part of a campaign. With Hive IP’s in-factory model, you only pay on the codes covered by an active promotion, at a rate that’s a fraction of the legacy supplier rate. On the same campaign volumes, customers typically save 78% or more, depending on volume and campaign cadence. The savings compound with every additional campaign run inside the engagement period because the hardware is already in place and only the codes covered by the new campaign are billed.
The simplest way to feel the impact is to enter your numbers below.
How much could in-factory unique-code printing save your programme?
Tell us how many promotional campaigns you typically run a year and the average size of each. The calculator compares the print cost of the legacy packaging-supplier route to in-factory printing with our ACG, and shows the typical print-cost saving as a percentage. We don’t publish our specific rates — the saving you see reflects how our pricing compares to the publicly-known industry midpoint of the legacy route.
Annual production volume isn’t in this calculator. Every pack you produce can carry a unique code at no extra cost — we only bill on the codes covered by an active promotional campaign. Coding 50 million packs or 500 million packs makes no difference to the print bill; what matters is what your campaigns activate.
Ready for a tailored estimate?
Send us your annual pack volume, your typical campaign cadence and your existing BBD printer setup. We’ll come back with a tailored savings estimate and an implementation plan.
Or get straight in touch: info@hiveip.co.uk