Fees for BLE and NRF license

[Marcin]

I have designed new device based on nrf51822 chip. New PCB with your chip and other elements. I with my team want to sell the standalone device with update possibility by the bootloader. This device will collect data from environment and will send this data by BLE to the mobile device like the phone or tablet. How can we start to sell it? What must to be paid before selling, what kind of license? Do we have to pay any fee for nordic company or bluetooth org? Please, answer me in the tutorial form. I know there is a lot of information in your site like: devzone.nordicsemi.com/.../ devzone.nordicsemi.com/.../

but this is not explain everything.

I would be greatfull for help. Best regards,

[RK]

You don't need to pay Nordic anything, they earn their money from selling these amazing chips.

If however you want to be able to advertise as a Bluetooth device you are going to have to pay fees to the bluetooth org to certify your product. You used to be able to do this very cheaply provided you were using only already-certified components, certified implementations of services etc, however now there is a fairly hefty fee for any kind of qualification.

This is on top of any certification you need to do for FCC, CE etc compliance for the device. Sticking closely to the reference designs means you are more likely to pass certification, but you still have those costs.

[Marcin]

So if I am using NRF chip and softdevice110, which are already certifield I dont have to do any qualification tests? I just have to buy the bluetooth license? Does that license from bluetooth.org is kind of new unique UUID or something?

[Hung Bui]

Hi Marcin,

RK was correct, you don't have to pay Nordic any fee since you already bought our chip. You only pay the Declaration ID fee for Bluetooth Qualificatoin and the other certifications such as FCC CE.

For Bluetooth qualification, you can find the QDID match with your chip and the softdevice here.

After that you can start with this START B instruction here.

You don't need to any of the Bluetooth qualification that we already done with the QDID, but you may need to do a RF-PHY retest since your hardware is not the same as what we used for testing. You may have to contact a test house for this purpose.