RFID Journal Staff asked 9 years ago Is a definitive price chart available?
—Name withheld
———
I have not seen any definitive price chart showing the price of an RFID inlay (the raw tag not converted into a label or some other form factor). One reason is that price is based on volume. If you were to buy one inlay, it might cost you 15 cents, whereas if you were to buy 1 million, they might cost you 7 cents apiece.
When I first started covering RFID in 2001 (yes, it has been that long), the price of passive high-frequency (HF) inlays was about 70 cents in small volumes. Ultrahigh-frequency (UHF) tags did not yet exist at the time. The first UHF tags based on the Gen 1 RFID standard entered the market in 2003 and cost about 50 cents each. By 2007, the price of inlays had dropped to about 7 cents each in volumes of 1 million or more units. In 2009, Invengo introduced an inlay that cost 5.8 cents (see Invengo Debuts in the U.S. Market With 5.8-Cent Inlay).
Although volumes are ramping up, there has not been a lot of movement in price recently, because margins have become thinner over the years. I believe that you can probably get an inlay for 5 cents today in very large volumes (10 million or more).
—Mark Roberti, Founder and Editor, RFID Journal
Previous Post Can TI’s CC1101 Transceiver Serve as a UHF RFID Reader? »