OriginLock

Idea

OriginLock keeps a manufacturer's USMCA tariff preference from silently expiring. Small and mid-size US manufacturers that export to Canada and Mexico self-certify Regional Value Content (RVC) to qualify for USMCA duty-free treatment, then file that certificate away and never look at it again. OriginLock ingests a company's bill of materials, supplier country-of-origin declarations, and per-component costs, recalculates RVC continuously, and flags the moment a supplier swap or cost change quietly drops a SKU below the qualifying threshold, before a CBP audit finds it first.

Market gap

USMCA lets exporters self-certify origin instead of applying for a government-issued certificate, which sounds simpler but pushes all of the qualification math and recordkeeping onto the manufacturer with no third party checking the work. CBP audit activity is up roughly 20 percent year over year heading into the 2026 USMCA joint review, and enforcement is tightening: a Certificate of Origin missing any of the nine required data elements is grounds for retroactive duty assessment plus a 10 percent recordkeeping penalty, and non-compliant claims in Mexico can trigger penalties of 130 to 150 percent of the duty that should have been paid. Small manufacturers rarely have a trade compliance officer. They calculate RVC once when the certificate is first issued, in a spreadsheet, and never re-run it when a supplier changes, a cost shifts, or a bill of materials is revised, so a certificate that was valid on day one can be false by the time CBP asks for proof, years later, inside the mandated five-year retention window. The timing is right now because the 2026 joint review is expected to tighten rules of origin further and audit volume is already climbing ahead of it.

Total Addressable Market (TAM)

Bottom-up, from official USTR data plus stated assumptions:

• USTR's USMCA SME fact sheet counts more than 43,000 US manufacturing firms whose jobs are supported by exports to Canada and Mexico (source: USTR USMCA SME fact sheet, ustr.gov). Use this as the addressable firm count.
• Assumption: roughly 60 percent of these manufacturers make products with multi-country inputs that require an active RVC calculation to qualify (versus wholly-obtained goods that qualify automatically). That is 25,800 firms in the Serviceable Addressable Market (SAM).
• Pricing: flat monthly subscription tiered by SKU count, roughly $199 to $799 a month. Blended average $400/month = $4,800 annual contract value (ACV), set below what a single Thomson Reuters ONESOURCE module costs a mid-size company (users report paying just under $50,000 a year for one ONESOURCE module, per TrustRadius).
• TAM: 43,000 firms x $4,800 ACV = ~$206M.
• SAM: 25,800 RVC-dependent firms x $4,800 = ~$124M.
• SOM: a realistic self-serve, no-sales-team penetration of 2 percent of SAM in the first 2 to 3 years = ~516 customers x $4,800 = ~$2.5M ARR.

Additional context: USTR separately reports 89,492 US SMEs exported goods to Canada and 53,682 to Mexico in the most recent year measured (2018, latest USTR SME dataset available), showing the exporter base is an order of magnitude larger than the manufacturing-firm figure used above, so the 43,000 manufacturing-firm base is the conservative anchor, not the ceiling.

Monetization strategy

Flat monthly SaaS subscription, billed per company account and tiered by number of active SKUs under monitoring. The company pays whether or not a certificate is ever audited, because the product's job is continuous monitoring and audit-defense recordkeeping, not a one-time document. Customers keep paying because every new supplier, cost change, or new SKU restarts the exposure the tool exists to catch, and because CBP's five-year lookback means the audit-defense binder has to keep accumulating for years after a certificate is issued.

Pricing strategy

• Starter: $199/month, up to 25 monitored SKUs. Entry point for a single-product or small-catalog manufacturer.
• Growth: $399/month, up to 100 monitored SKUs. Anchor tier for most target customers.
• Scale: $799/month, unlimited SKUs, priority alerting, and a dedicated audit-binder export per customs broker relationship. No annual contract required; monthly, cancel anytime, because the audience is exactly the kind of manufacturer with no procurement process for a multi-year enterprise trade software contract.

Lead magnet

A free, no-signup "USMCA RVC Threshold Checker": the visitor enters a product's HTS category and a rough transaction value and non-originating material cost, and gets back the qualifying RVC threshold for that category under both the transaction value and net cost methods, plus a one-line verdict on whether their numbers currently clear it. It proves the calculation logic works before asking for a credit card, and it is the exact calculation OriginLock runs continuously once a customer connects real data.

Social proof that the problem exists

• CBP audit activity has increased roughly 20 percent year over year as the agency works through a growing volume of origin claims ahead of the 2026 joint review, and CBP has been tightening USMCA certification audits since a Section 122 carve-out took effect in February 2026: https://carraglobe.com/usmca-2026-review-importers/
• Penalty structure is severe and specific: a Certificate of Origin missing any of the nine required data elements triggers retroactive duty assessment plus a 10 percent recordkeeping penalty, and non-compliant claims processed in Mexico can carry penalties of 130 to 150 percent of the duty owed: https://www.prodensa.com/insights/blog/usmca-certificate-of-origin-requirements-guide
• A real, named enforcement outcome: CBP fined an automotive company $2.5 million for failing to comply with rules of origin requirements: https://carraglobe.com/usmca-2026-review-importers/
• Practitioner-level frustration with the ongoing administrative burden, not just the one-time filing: "many perceive FTAs as being more trouble than they are worth" because of the recurring cost of tracking certificates of origin, expirations, renewals, and revisions across a product catalog: https://flashglobal.com/free-trade-agreement/
• Industry guidance confirms this is a recurring, not one-time, calculation problem: "Regional Value Content calculations must be continuously updated as sourcing, costs, and production inputs change, and if a supplier fails to certify the origin of a component, the OEM may be unable to satisfy the treaty's regional sourcing requirements": https://mexicooemconnect.com/usmca-2026-review-manufacturing-integrity-trade-circumvention/

Competitors

• Descartes Visual Compliance / Descartes Customs and Regulatory Compliance Suite: enterprise global trade suite covering denied party screening, customs declarations, and FTZ management, sold to large multinational shippers with dedicated compliance teams, not built as a lightweight continuous RVC monitor for a single manufacturer's catalog.
• Thomson Reuters ONESOURCE Global Trade: quote-based enterprise pricing by entity, module, and jurisdiction; one module alone runs close to $50,000 a year for companies that report favorable pricing, aimed at multi-entity global tax and trade departments.
• E2open (formerly Amber Road): full global trade management platform with a certificate management module, but it is a multi-module enterprise implementation, not a self-serve signup for a single small manufacturer.
• Shipping Solutions: SME-friendly export documentation software that already generates USMCA Certificates of Origin and RVC worksheets, the closest existing competitor. It is a one-shot document generator: you fill in a worksheet, get a certificate, and file it. It does not re-check that certificate later when a supplier, cost, or bill of materials changes.

What competitors offer now

Descartes, Thomson Reuters, and E2open ship broad, powerful global trade suites (screening, classification, declarations, FTZ management) built for large multinational importers and exporters with dedicated staff to configure and run them; pricing and implementation are both sized for that buyer, not a 15 to 150 person manufacturer. Shipping Solutions ships the actual document: a guided USMCA Certificate of Origin generator with an RVC worksheet, in English, French, or Spanish, that stores product data for reuse across future certificates. None of the four continuously re-verifies an already-issued certificate against a changing bill of materials or supplier base, and none of them scores or defends the five-year audit-retention window as a first-class, ongoing product surface.

What can be done differently to attract customers

Position OriginLock as the second-opinion instrument that watches a certificate after it is issued, not the tool that writes it. Ingest whatever a manufacturer already has (a BOM export, supplier declaration PDFs, a cost spreadsheet) with no ERP migration and no Shipping Solutions replacement required, recalculate RVC on every data change, and turn a silent qualification failure into an alert the week it happens instead of a discovery during a CBP audit years later. Lead with the free RVC Threshold Checker so a compliance-anxious operations manager gets a real answer in 30 seconds, then convert on the fact that their actual answer might already be wrong and they have no way to know without connecting real data. Price and market flat and monthly, explicitly contrasted against the "contact sales" quote-based pricing every enterprise competitor uses, which is itself a trust signal for a buyer who has never bought trade compliance software before.