Spondeo — Pricing

Model: freemium. The consumer C2C proof-link path is free forever (it's the funnel). The developer API is free to start and metered as you grow. This page is committed product policy and is rendered at /pricing. Prices are USD, exclusive of tax.

Price ladder

Consumer C2C — verify once, mint shareable proof links, view per-link analytics: free forever. No account upgrade, no metering. It exists to show the privacy model publicly and feed the developer funnel.

Billing details

• Annual billing = 2 months free (~17% off) on Startup and Growth.
• Only successful verifications count toward the included quota and overage. A valid:false

response (or an invalid/expired presentation) is not billed.

• Metering is per account, not per key — sk_test_ sandbox calls are never billed.
• Overage applies on Startup and above. Free tier hard-stops at 500/mo (returns

429 quota_exceeded, links to /pricing) — no surprise bills, ever.

• Quota resets at the UTC month boundary.

Rationale

• Near-zero COGS. A verification is an email-domain lookup against vendored, redistributable data

(MIT/ISC/CC0/US-public-domain) plus a signature check. The only real variable cost is the verification email at issuance time, not per /v1/verify. This is what lets the consumer path be free forever and the free dev tier be generous.

• Free 500/mo matches the market floor. Didit's free identity tier set the expectation that a

meaningful free allowance is table stakes; we match it so a builder can ship and dogfood before paying anything.

• Overage priced to undercut identity verification by an order of magnitude. Stripe Identity is

~$1.50/check and Persona ~$0.30–0.50/check — those are document + selfie identity checks. Spondeo verifies affiliation with no PII custody, so even Startup overage ($0.015) is ~20–100× cheaper, and Scale (~$0.004) is cheaper still. We compete on both price and liability.

• Hard-stop only on Free; meter above it. New builders get a predictable, zero-risk free tier;

paying customers get elastic capacity without hitting a wall mid-launch.

• Scale is contact-sales because it carries non-self-serve commitments (SLA, DPA, security review,

custom schemas, SSO, dedicated subdomain) that warrant a conversation.

Upgrade path

A Free-tier key that hits 500/mo returns 429 quota_exceeded with a link to /pricing. Upgrading is self-serve (Stripe Checkout) for Startup and Growth; Scale is a "Contact sales" form that captures the lead. Downgrades and cancellations take effect at the end of the paid period (see docs/legal/refunds.md).

Billing implementation notes (when wiring real Stripe)

The current build ships a deterministic checkout stub (src/billing/index.ts, no live charges) with a drop-in seam for Stripe Billing. When connecting real Stripe:

• Create test-mode Products/Prices for Startup/Growth + a metered usage price; gate plan.limit off the

active subscription.

• Emit a metered usage event from recordUsage() for paid accounts.
• The inbound Stripe webhook handler MUST be idempotent — dedupe on Stripe's event.id (Stripe

delivers each event at-least-once and retries). Without it, a duplicate checkout.session.completed / customer.subscription.updated can double-provision or double-count. Persist processed event.ids and no-op on repeats. (Spondeo's own OUTBOUND webhooks already carry a dedupe id for the same reason.)

• Verify end-to-end with a Stripe test clock + test cards (4242…); assert the 429→checkout→200 transition.