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But that was a few years ago now. Since then, you’ve been exporting the same types of goods to the same places, and you’re probably paying somewhere between £50 and £100 per declaration for somebody else to fill in what’s become a fairly routine form. If you’ve never questioned that cost, you’re not alone. Most people don’t, because it feels like one of those things you just have to pay for.
You don’t, though. And this is how to work out whether it’s time to make a change.
What a customs broker actually does
Let’s be fair to brokers. A good one earns their money. They classify your goods, file declarations with HMRC, run compliance checks, and take on a degree of liability if something goes wrong.
If you’re shipping controlled substances, dual-use goods, or products with complicated origin rules, a broker’s knowledge is worth paying for. The same goes if you’re exporting into heavily regulated markets where the rules change often and the penalties for getting it wrong are serious.
That’s the scenario where broker fees make sense. The question is whether that’s your scenario.
Where the maths stops working
Most SMEs don’t ship exotic or regulated goods. They ship the same product lines to the same customers in the same countries, month after month. Once the HS codes are set and the process is familiar, there’s not much a broker is doing that you couldn’t do yourself with the right platform.
Say you’re filing 20 export declarations a month. A typical broker charges £50–£100 per declaration. At the lower end, that’s £1,000 a month, or £12,000 a year. A self-service platform like ExportDocuments.co.uk charges a flat £29.50 per declaration. That’s £590 a month for the same 20 declarations, or £7,080 a year. You’d save close to £5,000 without changing what gets filed or how quickly it’s processed.
But cost isn’t the whole story. Speed matters too. When you use a broker, your declaration sits in their queue alongside every other client’s work. When you file through a platform with a direct HMRC link, it goes straight through. Turnaround drops from hours (or days, depending on the broker) to minutes.
Then there’s control. With a broker, your export records sit in their system. If you need to pull up a declaration from six months ago for a VAT audit, you’re relying on them to find it and send it over. With your own platform account, everything you’ve ever filed is there, searchable, and accessible to your whole team whenever you need it.
What to look for if you’re switching
If you’re thinking about moving away from a broker, the platform you pick needs to do a few things well.
First, it should connect directly to HMRC so your declarations are processed quickly and you’re not just swapping one middleman for another.
Second, it should let you save product data and addresses so you’re not typing in the same information every time. If you ship 50 SKUs to the same 10 customers, re-entering that data for every declaration is a waste of everyone’s time.
You also want a platform that keeps a proper archive. Every declaration, time-stamped and stored, so when HMRC asks for proof of export you can find it in two minutes instead of chasing someone by email. Company-level accounts are worth looking for too, so your whole team can file and track declarations without everything going through one person’s login.
And here’s one that people overlook: support from actual customs specialists. A self-service platform doesn’t mean you’re on your own. At ExportDocuments.co.uk, you can add an expert review to any declaration for £10. That’s useful when you’re getting started, or when you hit a shipment that’s a bit more complicated than usual. You get the cost savings of doing it yourself with a safety net when you want one.
When a broker is still the right call
We’re not going to pretend a self-service platform is right for every business. If you export controlled goods, military or dual-use items, or products that require specific licences, you need someone with deep regulatory knowledge handling your paperwork. The same applies if you’re trading into markets with complex preferential origin rules, or if your product range is so wide and varied that classification is a genuine challenge every time.
If that’s you, keep your broker. They’re earning their fee.
But if you’re shipping standard commercial goods on well-established routes and you’re paying broker prices for what amounts to data entry, it’s worth asking whether that still makes sense.
The short version
Customs brokers do valuable work, and there are situations where you absolutely need one. But for a lot of UK SMEs, the exports are routine enough that a self-service platform will give you the same result, faster, for a fraction of the cost. You keep control of your records, your team can file declarations around the clock, and you’ve got expert support available when you need it.
Setting up an account on ExportDocuments.co.uk is free. You only pay when you file a declaration. If you want to see how it works before committing, you can request a demo and one of the team will walk you through it.