The Four Costs a Verification Quote Never Contains
No pilot or deployment exists behind any figure here, and competitor numbers are their published ones, restated and not verified by us.
Why the quote and the invoice disagree
A verification vendor quotes a per-check price. A finance team a year later reports a number two to four times larger. Neither party lied; they were counting different things.
Four costs sit outside the quote, and three of them are yours rather than the vendor's.
One: the review queue
Automated checks are cheap. Human review is not.
The share of your traffic that reaches a reviewer is set by your document mix, not by the vendor's automation rate. A machine-readable passport clears without a human. A driving licence outside the US and Canada has no machine-readable zone and no barcode, so it is optical text with no checksum, and a responsible pipeline sends it to a person. Turkish residence permits carry no MRZ at all.
So the honest question to a vendor is not "what is your automation rate" but "what is your automation rate on my document mix", and the honest answer requires your data, which is why you rarely get one before signing.
Two: abandonment
A user who starts verification and does not finish has cost you the acquisition and returned nothing. Whether those sessions appear in the denominator changes a per-verification figure substantially, and vendors differ on the convention without either choice being dishonest.
Ask which convention the quote uses. If completed-only, your real cost per acquired customer is higher than the number in front of you by exactly the abandonment rate.
Three: integration and change
The build is the visible part. The cost that surprises people is change: a new document type, a new market, a regulator amending its remote-onboarding rules. Each one is engineering work against a vendor's interface on the vendor's timeline.
Amortised across a contract, integration and change can exceed the per-check spend for a mid-volume buyer. It appears in no comparison table because it is not the vendor's cost.
Four: re-verification
This is the one that dominates, and it is invisible in a per-check quote because a per-check quote treats every check as new.
Most identity spend is not first-time onboarding. It is the same person verified again at a different institution, after a policy change, at a periodic review, or because a session expired. Under the model every incumbent uses, the second check costs what the first cost. The user re-uploads the same document, the vendor re-runs the same analysis, and the bill repeats because the earlier result was never portable.
What changes if a result travels
A reusable credential does not make verification cheaper. It makes the second one a different operation: a signature check against a public key rather than a document analysis with a review queue behind it.
That changes which of the four costs applies. The review queue does not apply to a signature check. Abandonment does not apply, because there is no capture flow to abandon. The economics move from per-check pricing toward per-presentation pricing, and the shape of the bill changes with them.
What we will not put on this page
A Solidus total-cost figure. Our pricing page states design figures and labels them as such, which is as far as the evidence goes.
The calculation worth doing before any vendor call
Take last year's verification spend. Split it into first-time checks and repeat checks of people you had already verified. Then split the first-time checks by whether the document was machine-readable.
Most teams have never separated those three numbers, and the split usually decides the answer before any vendor is compared. If repeat checks are a small share, the incumbents are priced correctly for you. If they are the majority, you are paying full price, repeatedly, for work you already bought.