Blog · Pricing
What KYC and face-verification APIs actually cost in India: a transparent, per-call teardown
The Indian KYC market hides its pricing behind sales calls and stray PDFs. Here is the model we publish instead — per-call credits, 1,000 free at signup, prepaid, no per-seat licensing and no minimums.
A PDF ranks for a competitor's pricing. That is the whole problem.
Search for what a KYC or face-verification API costs in India and the results tell you more about the market than about the price. Generic “what does KYC cost” guides, directory listings, and — on at least one competitor’s pricing query — a stray uploaded PDF that a sales team never meant to index. The pattern is consistent: nobody publishes a number, so anything that even looks like a number ranks.
That gap exists because per-call pricing is a commitment. Publish it and a buyer can compare you, forecast a bill, and hold you to it later. The honest version of a pricing page is therefore also the rarer one. This post is ours — the model we publish, the part we deliberately haven’t fixed yet, and why we say so out loud.
What we publish instead: a per-call credit table
Billing is prepaid credits, debited per call. There are no seats, no monthly platform fee, and nothing bundled you can’t see. Every billable endpoint deducts a fixed number of credits, and the whole schedule fits in one table:
| Check | Action | Credits |
|---|---|---|
| Face match (1:1) | face_match | 2 |
| Active session verify | session_verify | 2 |
| KYB validation | kyb_validate | 2 |
| Driver’s licence / ID barcode | document_id | 2 |
| Workflow run | workflow_run | 3 |
| V-CIP stream start | stream_start | 5 |
| Everything else | * | 1 |
Credit costs from the product configuration and the billing section of the integration guide. Anything not listed — passive liveness, AML screening, MRZ parsing, device analysis, identity and contact validation — costs 1 credit. An exhausted balance returns HTTP 402 insufficient_credits; nothing is silently dropped or queued.
Signup grants 1,000 free credits and the API key is shown once. Test keys are free and unmetered on their own isolated client, so you can wire and assert against the full API surface before a single live credit is spent. The complete, interactive version — with a usage calculator — lives on the pricing page.
The model, in five properties
Strip the marketing away and a pricing model is really five yes/no questions. Here are our answers, and why each one is the answer a buyer actually wants.
Per call, not per seat. You pay for verifications performed, not for named users of a console. A fraud analyst added in month three does not change the bill; a spike in onboarding does, proportionally.
Prepaid, with a real free tier. The first 1,000 credits are free at signup, no card. After that you top up credit packs — no monthly commitment, no minimum you have to grow into before the rate applies.
One ledger, fully auditable. Balance, ledger and usage are visible in the console and over the billing API, per request, with reasons. You can reconcile the bill against your own call logs rather than trusting an invoice.
The same price whether you self-serve or scale. All tiers call the same API and differ only in billing arrangement and deployment, not in capability. There is no feature paywall that quietly forces the sales call.
Self-host to leave the meter behind. When metered cloud stops making sense, the same engine runs on your own infrastructure on enterprise terms — the subject of a separate post.
Why rupee-per-credit isn't nailed down on this page — and we won't fake it
Here is the part most pricing pages would paper over. The exact rupee value of a credit is not final. The packs behind the usage calculator are labelled indicative, with final pack pricing set at launch, and the calculator says so next to every figure it shows.
We could have invented a clean per-check number to fill the gap. We didn’t, because a fabricated price is exactly the behaviour that makes the rest of this market’s pricing untrustworthy. What is fixed and publishable today is the structure — which checks cost 1, 2, 3 or 5 credits, the 1,000 free credits, prepaid with no seats or minimums — and that structure is enough to model your relative spend across check types right now.
For an external anchor, the one large vendor that publishes a flat face-API price is AWS, at roughly $0.015 per check — useful as a reference point for what a single automated face operation costs at cloud scale, and a reminder that public pricing is normal everywhere except, so far, this market.
Compare per completed KYC, not per attempt
One framing matters more than any single rate. A face-KYC bill is driven by how many calls it takes to complete one customer, not by the sticker price of a call. A cheaper per-call vendor that forces two liveness retries, a re-capture and a fallback check per user can cost more per completed KYC than a dearer one that gets there in a single signed response.
That is why the credit schedule above pairs with a rich response: a single face_match returns match, liveness, spoof, mask, age, quality and capture-integrity signals together, so one call decides more and you re-run fewer. When you price a vendor, price the whole journey — attempts, retries, fallbacks — against your own funnel, not the headline number.
What this post does not claim
Honest caveats
These are credit costs, not a final rupee price. The number of credits per check is fixed and published; the rupee value of a credit is indicative until launch. We would rather state that than print a number we might change.
No certifications are implied by any of this. A transparent price is a commercial property, not a security one. We are not iBeta, NIST, ISO or SOC 2 certified — our current status is written plainly on the trust page, and pricing honesty is not a substitute for it.
Questions to ask about any KYC vendor's pricing
If you are evaluating vendors, four pricing questions separate a real answer from a sales funnel. Is per-call pricing public, or does learning the price require a call? Is there a free tier you can build against without talking to anyone? Are you billed per verification or per seat? And can you audit the bill against your own request log? We keep the longer version of that list, with our own answers linked so you can verify them, on the vendor checklist — and the live rates, calculator and free-tier details are on the pricing page.