How Europe is killing makers and micro-entrepreneurs

While I generally agree, the specific regulation case seems to be particularly egregious, the playbook for the regulation already existed through the VAT system. They deliberately chose to add to the single markets fragmentation. By adding additional bureaucratic loops to enter each individual market.

Important nuance here is that the €3 for packages from China is a temporary solution and will eventually (2028?) be replaced by a more permanent system which _might_ work out more favourable for electronics.

Having said that, the customs duty will go to the EU budget so there's now a direct incentive for the EU to maintain or perhaps even increase this.

The Californian company probably opens their new plant in Missouri, so now it's not exactly a Californian company.

I run a small hardware startup, InfiShark Tech -- we sell affordable battery-powered cybersecurity hardware worldwide. Europe has been by far the hardest market for us.

The costs in this article are understated for products like ours. This is not just for packaging -- they have separate compliance schemes for electronics (WEEE). If selling products with batteries, you must comply with separate battery regulations. If you pass a certain threshold or contain specific chemicals within your product, you must also comply with the REACH regulation. They work almost exactly the same the article describes, but often with higher costs.

Additionally, you must have CE certification for your hardware product. There is no threshold. This means going to a lab and testing RF capabilities, and for wireless / Bluetooth devices it can cost $1,500-$8,000. You can self-certify but it is risky.

We pay 800-2,000 EUR per country annually for the authorized representative (AR) and producer responsibility organization (PRO) fees. The AR's task is to hold some documents and provide them to the government when requested -- but that's it. We can do this for free. There's no reason the costs should be this high -- and I see minimal reason why they should exist in the first place. But we must comply.

It is important to understand which regulations and which fees to pay for the product. Therefore it is important to use something like PRONEXA -- a "One-Stop-Shop for simple compliance management".

With them, we paid ~800-1,000 EUR per country as a one-off registration fee. Then we pay 975 EUR annually per country to keep compliance. Note that these costs are ONLY to PRONEXA, not to each AR or PRO. They are effectively the middleman between us and the ARs / PROs.

The fee stability is quite poor, too. We paid the 2025 annual fees roughly a month before year-end and were charged another full annual fee in February 2026. In November 2025, we paid ~500 SEK for Sweden, and in Feb 2026, we were invoiced ~15,000 SEK for that same line.

With all of this burden we only pay the countries ~0.5-50 EUR annually for the actual environmental fees. This only makes sense for the government if that number jumps up to the thousands.

I think this contributes to lack of innovation in Europe. Small startups can't ship there, and you are limited to large companies overseas. The fix is dead simple -- just introduce a threshold, or charge a recycling fee upfront with each parcel coming in, depending on the HS code. What they did with IOSS is great. You register with one country, and all parcels under 150 EUR can be sent to all of Europe while being VAT compliant. They could implement the same thing for WEEE, battery regulations, packaging, and REACH. Register with one country and cover the rest.

We are barely break-even on some countries, and others we are totally underwater. We decided to do it as a future scaling opportunity, but this first year is quite tough. We are debating if we should continue selling to Europe at this stage.

You would not have the Euro if the IMF was in charge nor the many failures to have a single capital market. The EU, and politics that created it is much more complex than you think.