- How does billing work?
- You subscribe to a plan sized by your traffic. Bigger plans carry a lower effective rate per identification: $0.00396 on Starter, $0.00266 on Growth, $0.00199 on Scale. The more traffic you send, the less each identification costs. Anything above your included volume is billed at that same rate after the month closes.
- How many identifications do I need?
- One identification is one visitor check. The simplest way to size a plan is to start free and watch your usage, then extrapolate. For a quick estimate, count the monthly visits to the pages where you'd run a check: signup, login, checkout.
- Do you charge per user or per MAU?
- No. You're billed per identification (per check), not per monthly active user. You pay only for the checks you make, with no per-user surcharge.
- What counts toward my monthly identifications?
- One shared budget covers everything billable: each visitor check from the snippet is one identification, and a History API lookup costs one per record returned (at least one per lookup). Webhooks (including retries), viewing the dashboard, data exports, and profile/setup calls never count.
- What's in the Free tier?
- Exactly the same as the paid plans, just capped at 5,000 one-time identifications.
- Is there an annual discount?
- Yes. Billing yearly saves 20% on every paid tier. Monthly is the alternative.
- Can I change my plan later?
- Yes. Upgrade or downgrade anytime from your dashboard. Plans are sized by monthly volume, so you move to the tier that fits your traffic. Self-serve, no sales call.
- What happens if I exceed my monthly identifications?
- On a paid plan, nothing stops. Identification and risk scoring keep running past your included volume, and the extra identifications are billed at your plan rate on a separate invoice after the month closes. There is no overage surcharge: the rate is the same one your plan already pays. On Free the 5,000 are a hard cap, so further checks return a 402 (Payment Required) until you move to a paid plan.
- What if I exceed 500,000 identifications a month?
- Nothing breaks. Scale keeps identifying past 500,000 and bills the extra at $0.00199 per identification. If you expect to run well above that every month, email [email protected] for a committed-volume quote at a lower rate.
- Am I protected from overpaying?
- The gateway caps any single source at 20 requests per minute and then blocks it for an hour, and blocked requests are rejected before they are counted, so they are never billed. That puts a hard ceiling on what one source can add to your bill. You can also watch usage in the analytics dashboard as the month runs, and if something still looks wrong on an invoice, email [email protected] and we will look at it with you.
- Do you block users, or do I decide?
- You decide. ShieldLabs returns a risk score and the signals behind it; your rules choose whether to allow, challenge, or block. We never block anyone automatically.
- How long do you keep my data?
- Visit data is retained for up to 12 months, then purged. Available on every plan.
