The Re-Verification Break-Even: When a Portable Credential Pays for Itself
The numbers below are proposed commercial packages, not final contractual prices: Solidus's own pricing draft says so of itself, and this page repeats it rather than hides it. Nothing here is an offer to sign. It's arithmetic anyone can redo, and a concession stated first: on the very first identity check, Solidus is the more expensive option.
The concession, with the number attached
A first Solidus verification is priced, in the current draft, at $5.00. The source models a flat-fee incumbent, the kind of vendor that charges the same price on check one and check fifty, at roughly $1.50 per check. Compared on that single event, Solidus loses. There is no version of this page that pretends otherwise, because the honest case for a portable credential was never about the first check. It's about what happens after it.
What changes after the first check
Once a person holds a credential from that first check, the draft pricing prices reuse far below a fresh verification: $0.05 per re-verification event, against the incumbent's same flat $1.50 every time, because a flat-fee vendor has no cheaper tier for a person it already checked. The arithmetic for n reuse events after the first check:
| Running total after n reuses | |
|---|---|
| Solidus (first check + reuse) | $5.00 + $0.05 × n |
| Incumbent (flat fee, every check) | $1.50 × (n + 1) |
Set them equal and solve for n:
5.00 + 0.05n = 1.50(n + 1)
5.00 + 0.05n = 1.50n + 1.50
3.50 = 1.45n
n ≈ 2.41
The two running totals cross at n ≈ 2.4, somewhere between the third and fourth total check for the same person, Solidus's cumulative cost drops below the flat-fee incumbent's. Before that point, the incumbent is cheaper. This is not a rounded marketing figure; it's what falls out of the two prices above, and a reader with a calculator can check it in ten seconds.
Three qualifiers this page won't drop
These are draft prices, restated because it bears repeating at the exact point a reader might start treating the crossover as a guarantee: nobody has signed a contract at these figures, and they can change before anyone does. The crossover assumes reuse actually happens, that a second relying party accepts the credential from the first check instead of re-running its own. Nothing in the arithmetic makes that automatic. The math excludes integration cost, switching cost, and the value of certifications (SOC 2, ISO 27001) an incumbent may hold and Solidus does not, a real buyer's decision weighs those too, and this page isn't the place that resolves them.
The protocol floor is a different number
Solidus's pricing draft separately anchors a $0.001 per credential verification protocol floor: the modeled, not measured, economic anchor beneath the whole reuse story, and the basis for why reuse can be priced as cheaply as it is. It is not the number the break-even above uses; the $0.05 reuse price is a business-event tier priced above that floor, because a business proof event solves a workflow problem, not just a compute cost. Keeping these two layers separate matters: quoting $0.001 as if it were the reuse price a buyer actually pays would misstate the offer.
Why the crossover doesn't pay itself
The break-even math is real arithmetic on real draft prices, but n ≈ 2.4 only means something if reuse is available to have, if a second, unaffiliated relying party is willing to trust a check it didn't run itself. That's not a pricing problem; it's an adoption problem, and it is unsolved today. Read the cold-start problem for what has to exist before this arithmetic starts mattering to an actual buyer, and see Cost Per Verification, Total Cost of Ownership, Verification Reuse, and Vendor Lock-In for the fuller vocabulary this page draws its terms from. Re-KYC is the regulatory reason a second and third check happens at all: Solidus doesn't decide that cadence; the relying party's own compliance obligation does.