Pricing Credential Checks for AI Agents and API Calls
The numbers on this page are proposed commercial packages, not final contractual prices: Solidus's own pricing draft says so of itself, and this page repeats that rather than hides it. Say the concession plainly before any number: no agent operator, API vendor, or machine-to-machine platform pays Solidus anything today.
Why machine-scale pricing looks different from human pricing
Most of this pricing track prices a human check, a first-time identity verification that's comparatively expensive because it involves reading a document, running liveness, matching a face. This page is about a different shape of event: an autonomous agent or an API caller presenting a credential it already holds, thousands of times a day, where the cost of checking a signature is what's being priced, not the cost of establishing identity the first time. That's why these numbers sit near the protocol floor rather than in the dollar-to-several-dollar range the vertical business-event pages use.
The three modeled events
| Event | Suggested price |
|---|---|
| Consent receipt | $0.001–$0.01 |
| Credential-gated API call | $0.001–$0.05 |
| Agent action verification | $0.001–$0.01 |
These are the only three rows this page draws from the source's full pricing table, see
Business/pricing_and_unit_economics.md for the complete list, including the human-scale verticals
this page doesn't cover. Every figure here is a suggested price range, not a quote given to any buyer,
and no volume tier, discount schedule, or contract exists behind any of them.
The protocol floor
Solidus's pricing draft separately anchors a $0.001 per credential verification protocol floor, a modeled, not measured, economic anchor. It's worth stating first here, more than on most of this track's other pages, because the bottom of all three ranges above touches this exact number: at their cheapest, a consent receipt, a gated API call, and an agent action check all bottom out at the protocol floor itself. That is the draft's way of saying machine-scale reuse is priced close to cost, with the upper end of each range reflecting whatever additional workflow value, audit trail, dispute evidence, policy enforcement: the specific call is doing.
The one live receipt, and what it doesn't prove
Solidus's agent-identity SDK has minted one real agent passport, token 8064 on Base Sepolia, a public testnet, not Ethereum mainnet, resolving to a did:solidus DID and a BBS+ capability credential. A stranger can curl the agent's card and cross-check tokenURI/ownerOf against the chain directly; the mechanism is real and runnable. What it does not show is any of the three prices above being charged to anyone: no agent operator has integrated a gated-call flow against it, no consent receipt has been billed, and no volume of agent action verifications has run through a paying account. The passport proves the identity plumbing works. It doesn't promote it to a business.
How this differs from the human break-even
The re-verification break-even works out when a $5.00 first human check, followed by $0.05 reuse events, starts beating a flat ~$1.50 incumbent re-check, a crossover around the fourth check for the same person. That arithmetic doesn't transfer here. There is no "expensive first call" to concede for machine-to-machine events: the source doesn't model agent or API pricing as an onboarding cost followed by cheaper reuse, because there's no analogous "first verification" step being amortized. An agent's credential is presented and checked the same way on call one as call ten thousand. The honest comparison for this page isn't a break-even crossover; it's simply whether a sub-cent-to-low-cent per-call fee is cheap enough that a builder doesn't need to think about it, which is a judgment this page leaves to the reader, not a number it can prove today.
A worked illustration, not a bill
If an agent made 1,000 credential-gated API calls in a day at the top of the stated range ($0.05 each), the modeled daily cost would be $50; at the bottom ($0.001), it would be $1, a fifty-times spread that reflects how little the source pins down about what separates a $0.001 call from a $0.05 one. Nothing here implies a thousand-call-a-day agent exists on Solidus today; it doesn't. It's back-of-envelope math, offered so the reader isn't left guessing what the ranges mean in practice.
What this page won't claim
No agent operator has integrated, piloted, or been billed for any of this. No API vendor has shipped a gated-call product against it. These are draft prices for a mechanism, agent passport, did:solidus, BBS+ capability credentials. That is real and testable today, attached to a pricing model that is not. For the three-layer pricing story this page sits inside, see how Solidus prices verification; for the human-check economics this page deliberately doesn't reuse, see the re-verification break-even.