What is the price?

In 2025, the Rolls-Royce integrated¹ system Trax eMRO its platform Blue Data Thread equipped with a

. This allowed airlines, service organizations and the Rolls-Royce (the aircraft engine manufacturer) to share vital engine health data online.

Such exchange accelerates maintenance, reduces aircraft downtime, and improves aircraft operating efficiency.

The development of such projects raises questions about data access and the cost of sharing.

The data transfer process accounts for only about 20% of the data sharing costs. Main expenditures appear when collecting and cleaning data, ensuring system compatibility, and complying with legislation, especially when transferring financial, medical, transactional and sales data.

In February 2026, the EC considered the compensation Guidance on determining reasonable for expenses in mandatory B2B data exchange between companies under the Data Act rules, namely: data generated by connected devices (i.e. IoT: vehicle telemetry, data from home appliances, industrial sensors, medical devices, etc.); data required for digital services related to the device (such as equipment diagnostic data). If a data owner (for example, device manufacturer) has affiliated companies or an agreement with a data recipient (for example, with a partner service center for car repairs), it should not discriminate against competitors of such partners. Other service centers should also have access to data under the same conditions as the manufacturer's partners.

The new EC Guidance defines the list of costs to be taken into account when setting the selling price of the data. The cost should be “reasonable”, or it may not exist at all.

² The concept is

To determine “reasonableness,” the EU uses the FRAND concept. based on the practice of licensing “patents for technologies that are essential for the³ implementation of a technical standard”

(for example, 4G, GSM, Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, etc.). If a company wishes to produce a product corresponding to the standard, it must pay royalties for the patent.

The FRAND concept in the EC Guidance keeps the cost of access to data at a level proportionate to the actual costs incurred by the data holder, without creating excessive financial barriers for other companies.

Thus, for instance, in the Interdigital case (owns patents’ package for 3G, 4G, 5G) the company inflated the price of the license for Lenovo by 65% above the "reasonable" cost. FRAND mechanism regulates the cost of access to technologically important resources, including, towards data.

What are the costs that the EC Guidance suggest to include in pricing?

For example, pursuant to a general rule, the Data Act requires that data be provided in a structured, commonly used and machine-readable format. If a company stores data in a rare format, the cost of converting cannot be included in the price paid by the data recipient. Payment is allowed only for the actual costs of providing access to the data.

For example, costs for maintaining server infrastructure, processing access requests, etc.

It is unacceptable to shift normal business operating costs, such as the cost of improving or enhancing data quality, to data recipients.

Individual investment costs may be included, such as those for obtaining data from external sources, transferring it to the holder's infrastructure, or creating new data sets (including deploying data collection devices). However, compensation may not include investments already recouped through the sale of a connected product or service, nor expenses for data created jointly with the user.

Therefore, the price of access is determined as the amount of costs required for

providing data.

For example, in 2025,

JPMorgan distributed price-lists to fintech start-up companies dealing with access to clients’ banking data, which have been earlier provided for free. However, now, costs amount to 60-100% from the start-ups revenues. This is why price containment is important for developing innovation.

From the monitoring issue No. 2 (26), February 2026. Download the full issue (PDF) · issue page at the Gaidar Institute