The cost of a whistleblower reporting channel varies significantly depending on your organisation. There is no fixed price that applies to everyone: the price depends on the size of your organisation, whether you build the channel yourself or use a provider's solution, and what else is included in the service, such as templates, multilingual support and assistance with notification to the works council.
What most business owners mainly want to know: is this a major investment or a manageable annual expense? That depends on your choice. Building your own system usually costs more time and money than using an existing platform, where you pay for use rather than for development and maintenance.
What determines the price
The main factor is the size of your organisation. A company with fifty employees has different needs than a company with five hundred employees, and most providers charge accordingly, either per number of employees or per location. The number of languages in which employees need to be able to report also matters, as does the question of whether you connect one legal entity or several.
A second factor is exactly what is included in the service. Some providers supply only a technical reporting channel. Others additionally provide the reporting procedure itself, the works council approval package, information for employees and an annual report. The more of this work is already prepared, the less time you spend on drafting and maintaining it yourself, and this often outweighs the bare subscription fee.
Building your own system or using an existing platform
Building an internal system yourself, for example via a simple form on your own website, seems cheap but brings hidden costs with it. You must ensure anonymity, data security, compliance with statutory deadlines and a management environment in which a case manager maintains an overview. This is precisely the work that a specialised platform has already set up.
With an existing platform, you typically pay a fixed annual fee, often tied to the number of employees. This makes costs predictable and comparable between providers. how the platform is structured shows which components are included as standard and where each piece of information comes from.
What is usually included in a subscription
With most subscriptions, you get not only a reporting page, but also implementation of each statutory obligation, with associated deadlines that run automatically: the receipt confirmation and feedback on the assessment. Templates for documenting decisions, and notification as soon as something changes that affects your situation, are usually included as well.
What remains free, even without a subscription, is basic information: the short answer to a specific question, an indication of your situation and the location in the official text. This way you can first check whether and how the obligation applies to you, before spending money on a solution. in a few questions see whether the obligation applies to you is a logical starting point for that.
The role of the works council in costs
If your organisation has a works council, it must approve the reporting procedure before it takes effect. This does not cost money in the form of an invoice, but it does take time: consultation, adjustments and sometimes a second round of presentation. A provider that supplies the approval package ready-made often saves more time in practice than a cheap bare channel without that support.
Where you find the rates
Because the price depends on your size and what you need, it is not practical to mention a single figure here. Concrete rates, broken down by number of employees and by component, can be found in our rates overview. If you first want to understand which components a reporting procedure must contain in any case, then the knowledge base with background information provides an explanation of that by topic, regardless of which provider you ultimately choose.
Would you first like to know whether the reporting obligation applies to your organization and what exactly must be in place? Take the free quick-scan or read the other topics in the knowledge base before making a choice about costs and provider.