Cost Per Verification Is the Wrong Number, and Every Vendor Quotes It
Nothing below is a case study. No pilot or deployment exists behind any figure here, and where a competitor's price appears it is their published number, restated and not verified by us.
The metric everyone compares on
Cost per verification is the number that ends procurement conversations. A vendor quotes a price for checking one person once, the buyer multiplies by expected volume, and the cheapest credible line wins.
It is a clean metric and it prices the wrong event.
What it leaves out, in the order it hurts
The second verification of the same person. Most identity spend is not first-time onboarding. It is the same customer verified again at a new institution, after a policy change, at a periodic review, or because a session expired. CPV prices each of those as though the first one never happened.
The review queue. A published per-check price assumes automation. Any document without a machine-readable zone, which includes most driving licences outside the US and Canada and every Turkish residence permit, goes to a human. The vendor's list price is not what that check costs you; the reviewer's hour is.
Abandonment. A user who drops out mid-flow costs you the acquisition and returns nothing. Whether that user appears in the denominator changes the number substantially, and vendors differ on whether they count them.
The integration. Amortised over the contract, a multi-week integration can exceed a year of per-check fees for a mid-volume buyer. It is a real cost and it never appears in a CPV comparison.
Why the industry keeps quoting it anyway
Because it is the only number both sides can compute before signing anything. Every alternative requires knowing the buyer's document mix, their abandonment rate and their review policy, and no vendor gets that data during a sales cycle. CPV survives because it is available, not because it is right.
The question that actually separates vendors
Not "what does one check cost", but "what does the second check cost, and who pays for it?"
Under the model every incumbent uses, the answer is that the second check costs the same as the first, and the buyer pays again. The user re-uploads a document they have already submitted elsewhere, a vendor re-runs the same analysis, and the cost repeats because the result was never portable.
A reusable credential changes the arithmetic rather than the price. The first verification costs what a verification costs. The second is a signature check, and a signature check is arithmetic that runs in milliseconds against a public key.
What we will not do on this page
Quote you a Solidus per-verification price. Our own surfaces currently carry more than one figure for the same per-presentation metric, all derived from a token with no market, and that inconsistency is unresolved. Putting a favourable number beside a competitor's real, published, contractual price would not be a comparison. It would be a number chosen from a set we have not settled.
What we will say is where the modelling sits: a protocol floor around a tenth of a cent per credential verification, and business-event pricing above it that varies by what the event is worth to the buyer. Both are design figures, not quotes, and how we price states them with that caveat attached.
What to ask your current vendor
Three questions, and the third is the one that moves money.
What fraction of my checks reach a human reviewer, measured on my document mix rather than yours? What do I pay when the same person verifies again in twelve months? And if I leave, what do my verified users take with them?
If the answer to the third is nothing, you are not buying verification. You are renting it, and the meter restarts every time.
Where this leaves a buyer today
What Solidus has is an architecture where the second verification is not a repeat purchase, and a published account of what that costs to run.
If your verification spend is dominated by first-time onboarding, the incumbents are priced correctly for you and this argument does not apply. If it is dominated by re-verification, the metric your vendor quotes is hiding the majority of your bill.