- 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 on your renewal invoice.
- 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 a one-time hard cap of 5,000 identifications. There is no overage on Free: further checks return 402 until you move to a paid plan.
- 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, overage is on by default: identification keeps running past your included volume, and extras are billed at your plan rate on the renewal invoice. There is no surcharge, because the rate is the same one your plan already pays. Turn overage off in dashboard Settings → Billing if you want a hard stop instead; further checks then return 402. Extra identifications already used this period are still billed on renewal. On Free the 5,000 are a hard cap with no overage, so further checks return 402 until you move to a paid plan.
- What if I exceed 500,000 identifications a month?
- With overage on (the default), Scale keeps identifying past 500,000 and bills the extra at $0.00199 per identification. If you turned overage off, further checks return 402 at the cap. 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?
- Yes, and you decide where the ceiling sits. Turn overage off in dashboard Settings → Billing and nothing bills past your included volume: further checks return 402, so the plan price is all you pay going forward. The gateway also 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. You can 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.
