Three tiers. One tent.
Free public substrate for everyone. Paid Subscription for professional users who live in this world every week. I500 Enterprise for institutional buyers. The architecture is Bloomberg-shape: free articles + Subscription + Terminal-equivalent. SCANSMART-equivalent: free public + Subscription + I500 Enterprise.
Compare the tiers.
| Free | Subscription | Institutional | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Price | £0 | £TBD | £TBD |
| For | Everyone — consumers, parents, journalists exploring, partners exploring, casual researchers | Professional users who use this data weekly — journalists on food-policy beats, dietitians, public-health analysts, council policy officers, food NGO researchers, food-focused academics, retail buyers | Institutional buyers — NHS commissioners, councils, FMCG manufacturers, retail intelligence platforms, media organisations, food-tech investors, public-health analysts, food-policy journalists, academic researchers. Two sub-tiers serve different depths of need (see "Inside the institutional tier" below). |
| CheckIT (PWA) | Full | Full | Full |
| Weekly Supermarket Checkout | Full, every Monday | Full + early access (Sunday evening) | Full + custom segments |
| Knowledge Library | Full | Full + curated PDFs (where licensing permits) | Full + bespoke briefings |
| I500 Shop Directory | Full browse | Full + searchable filters + alerts on new shops | Snapshot: structured borough / category snapshots. Full Dataset: custom queries against the institutional corpus |
| CheckIT Stories | Full reading + submit your own | Full + submission editing/feature priority | Aggregate insights + co-branded story partnerships |
| SKU search across all weekly Checkouts | — | Yes | Snapshot: scoped historical search. Full Dataset: full historical analysis |
| Audit data export | — | CSV / JSON, with attribution | Snapshot: structured snapshots + selective named-product reveals. Full Dataset: full corpus licence + API + dashboard |
| Email digest | Yes (Monday Checkout digest) | Yes + dietitian/clinician analytical sidebars | Snapshot: institutional-band digest. Full Dataset: bespoke commissioner briefings |
| Developer API | — | Read-only, rate-limited | Snapshot: —. Full Dataset: full access + SLA |
| Support | Community + documentation | Email, 5-day response | Snapshot: 3-day email. Full Dataset: named account manager + 1-day response |
| CTA | Open CheckIT → | Join the waitlist → | Institutional enquiries → |
Two sub-tiers. Different depths. Different price bands.
The institutional column above splits into two sub-tiers because institutional buyers buy data products at two different depths. The split mirrors how Bloomberg, Mintel, and Kantar structure their B2B offers; SCANSMART applies the same pattern in food-and-cosmetics-intelligence space.
For analysts who need to scope or scan.
Structured snapshot views of the I500 corpus by category, postcode, manufacturer cluster, condition-lens scoring distribution. Selective named-product reveals at sample level. Aggregate basket-pattern statistics. Static quarterly/annual analytical reports. Read-only access to scoped slices of the dataset.
For: public-health analysts, policy researchers, food-policy journalists, council policy officers, NGO researchers, food-focused academics, smaller commissioning bodies, FMCG analysts running pre-engagement scope.
Pricing band: mid-band institutional subscription. Mintel Reports analyst tier as the closest published comparable. Specific figure locked at v5.0 sign-off.
For enterprises that need ongoing programmatic access.
Full row-level access to the I500 corpus. Ingredient-centric query layer (the inverted ingredient → products schema). Source-priority adjudicated dataset. Condition-lens scored data feeds (diabetes / hypertension / family / general). Reformulation-tracking timeseries (DHSC commitments joined to SCANSMART audit history). Custom commissioner briefs. Sector comparison reports. Developer API + SLA. Named account manager.
For: NHS Integrated Care Boards, FMCG manufacturers running reformulation tracking, retail intelligence platforms integrating I500 data, large councils, food-tech investors with diligence-shape data needs, media organisations with continuous food-investigation publishing.
Pricing band: Bloomberg-Terminal / Mintel Reports Premium / Kantar Worldpanel enterprise band. Six-figure annual at Year 3 target; tiered Year 1 launch pricing to seed institutional adoption.
Both sub-tiers serve different institutional buyers at different price bands. Both produce revenue that funds the free side — CheckIT, the Knowledge Library, the Weekly Checkout, the Shop Directory, CheckIT Stories. The free side does load-bearing credibility work for both paid tiers; the paid tiers monetise the granular data the free side is derived from. This is structurally identical to Bloomberg's loop applied in food-and-cosmetics-intelligence space.
Important: the per-product CheckIT scan stays free for everyone, regardless of tier. A user holding a product gets the full per-product read on that product. No paywall ever sits between a person at the moment of decision and the read on the product they hold. The institutional tier sells access to the corpus that produces the readings — not access to any individual user's reading.
Subscription tier ships with v5.1 of the platform.
v5.0 (this website) is launching now in May 2026. The subscription engine — payment infrastructure, account management, content gating — ships with v5.1 in the months following. The architecture is committed; the engine is coming. Final pricing will be set after early-subscriber waitlist signal informs the band.
If you sign up to the waitlist below, you’ll be the first to know when subscriptions go live, and you’ll get founding-subscriber pricing for the first 12 months. We never spam the waitlist; one notification email when the engine launches, then nothing else unless you choose to subscribe.