If I remember rightly it costs about £105 to stick the plate on a retention certificate, then yearly its £25 to keep it on there. They are a bit cheeky in that fee you pay to get the retention certificate includes the actual fee of allocating the plate to the next vehicle, so if you decide to put the plate on another car it doesnt cost you anything. You also dont get any refund, so if you put it on a cert, then 2 weeks later put it on another car, you still pay £105 for the whole year.
Wow not silly money then but still more outgoings on top of tax, insurance etc... Defo not for me. However fully appreciate why someone would like to have one, and I guess money being no object I'd be more likely to be interested although probably more on my car as opposed to the bike. Thing is I run an 8x6" plate on the bike because the full 9x6.5" looks terrible on the back imho, being a non memorable plate hopefully will continue in me not have any attention from plod - Not had issues on the past 3 bikes wearing an 8x6" plate
I guess one of the advantages on a bike is though, that you could get a "private" plate with a lot less characters on it, which means you could have a physically smaller number plate. So if you went for something like 23 ABC then your plate could be a lot smaller than AB63 ABC if you see what I mean.
Interestingly I found out from the seller I bought my 8x6 plate from that he can actually fit the correct thickness characters and with the legal spacing etc.. onto the 8x6 plate but it would result in less surround, from what I can find out the overall size is not important. Not sure if it would look a bit shat though!
