Persona vs Veriff vs Sumsub: Real Identity Verification Cost per 1,000 Checks in 2026
Every identity verification vendor charges "per verification," but a verification is not a standard unit. One vendor's base check is a document scan and a liveness selfie; another's includes a sanctions screen; a third bundles ongoing monitoring into what looks like a one-time fee. Before comparing prices, it's worth being explicit that this article compares list rates for broadly comparable document-plus-selfie checks, and flags where a vendor's bundle goes further than that baseline.
The short answer
Veriff has the lowest published entry rate of the three — $0.80 per verification with no monthly minimum on its self-serve Essential tier — which makes it the cheapest option at low volume by a wide margin. Sumsub publishes $1.35 per verification but requires a $149/month minimum, which matters enormously below about 110 verifications a month. Persona now publishes a specific, confirmed structure for its Essential plan: $250/month on a 12-month minimum contract, including 500 services a month, with additional services above that allowance billed at $1.50 each and no rollover of unused services. At low volume, Persona's $250 floor makes it the most expensive of the three; above roughly 1,700 services a month its confirmed per-service overage rate ($1.50) exceeds Sumsub's flat $1.35, so Persona does not become cheaper than Sumsub simply by scaling up.
What "one verification" includes, by vendor
| Persona | Veriff | Sumsub | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Pricing status | Published Essential plan | Published, tiered by regulatory complexity | Published entry rate, with a monthly minimum |
| Entry structure | Essential: $250/month, 12-month minimum contract, 500 services included | Essential: $49/month + $0.80/verification (unregulated use cases) | Basic: $149/month minimum, $1.35/verification |
| Overage rate | $1.50 per service above the included 500/month; unused included services do not roll over to the next month | Hybrid: $99/month + $1.39/verification (regulated industries) | Compliance: $299/month minimum, $1.85/verification (adds AML screening) |
| Top self-serve tier | Not published beyond Essential | Premium: $209/month + $1.89/verification (elevated fraud risk) | Not published beyond Compliance |
| Enterprise | Custom, likely applicable well before 100,000 services/month | Custom, reported $2–$3/verification at scale | Custom |
| What one "service" includes | Persona's official documentation defines a service as a single verification-related check (for example, a government ID check or a selfie/liveness check); a full identity verification flow combining several checks can consume more than one service | Document verification, selfie/liveness, automated 98% decisioning, ~6-second median decision | Document verification, selfie/liveness; AML/sanctions/PEP screening is a separate, higher tier (Compliance) |
| Extended data retention | Not itemized in available sources | Reported add-on, $0.30–$0.40 per verification | Not itemized in available sources |
| Startup Program | A separate, eligibility-based discount program for qualifying early-stage companies — distinct from standard Essential pricing and not modeled in this article's scenarios | Not applicable | Not applicable |
Cost at four volumes
Persona's figures below are calculated directly from its confirmed Essential plan structure: $250/month covers the first 500 services, and every service beyond that costs $1.50, with no rollover of unused allowance. Sumsub and Veriff figures come directly from their own published rates.
| Services/month | Persona Essential ($250 + $1.50/service above 500) | Veriff Essential ($49 + $0.80/check) | Sumsub Basic ($149 min, $1.35/check) |
|---|---|---|---|
| 100 | $250 (minimum applies; effective $2.50/service) | $129 ($1.29/check) | $149 (minimum applies; $1.49/check) |
| 1,000 | $250 + 500 × $1.50 = $1,000 (effective $1.00/service) | $849 ($0.85/check) | $1,350 ($1.35/check) |
| 10,000 | $250 + 9,500 × $1.50 = $14,500 (effective $1.45/service) | $8,049 ($0.80/check) | $13,500 ($1.35/check) |
| 100,000 | $250 + 99,500 × $1.50 = $149,500 (effective $1.495/service) — at this volume Persona's own sales process is very likely to move the account to custom Enterprise pricing rather than leave it on list-rate Essential billing, so this figure is illustrative of what the published formula would produce, not a quote to expect | $80,049 ($0.80/check) — likely also enterprise-negotiated at this scale | $135,000 ($1.35/check) — likely also enterprise-negotiated |
Persona's effective per-service cost is not monotonic in the simple sense of "cheaper at scale" — it falls sharply between 100 and 1,000 services (as the $250 floor is amortized over more volume), then rises again from 1,000 to 100,000 as the $1.50 overage rate, which is higher than the $250 floor's blended rate at low-to-moderate volume, comes to dominate the bill.
How minimum commitments distort cost at low volume
At 100 verifications a month, Sumsub's $149 monthly minimum makes its effective per-check cost $1.49 — higher than its own published $1.35 rate — because the minimum isn't reached by usage alone. The minimum stops distorting the per-check cost once volume crosses roughly 110 verifications a month ($149 ÷ $1.35). Persona's $250 minimum has a larger effect at low volume: at 100 services, the effective cost is $2.50 per service purely from the floor, and a company doing fewer than 500 services a month is paying for allowance it doesn't use, since the 500 included services do not roll over. Veriff is the only one of the three with no published minimum on its entry tier, so its effective cost scales cleanly from the first verification. Persona's structure adds a second, less obvious distortion on top of the floor: once volume exceeds 500 services, the $1.50 overage rate is itself higher than Sumsub's flat $1.35 rate, so a growing company on Persona Essential can find itself paying more per service than it would on Sumsub specifically in the 500-to-several-thousand-service range, even though Persona's $250 floor looked cheaper at very low volume.
Failed and incomplete applicants are a real cost multiplier
None of the three vendors' published per-verification rate distinguishes a completed, successful verification from an attempt that fails or is abandoned partway through. Veriff is specifically reported to bill for completed checks including declined sessions — meaning a fraud-heavy applicant pool, or a poorly designed onboarding flow with high abandonment, inflates the effective cost per successful verified user well above the advertised per-check rate. A company with, illustratively, a 70% completion rate is paying for roughly 1.43 attempts per successful user, turning Veriff's $0.80 published rate into an effective $1.14 per successful verification.
Do not mix KYC bundles with simple identity checks
Sumsub's $1.35 entry rate is document-plus-selfie verification only; AML, sanctions, and PEP screening require the $1.85 Compliance tier, a genuinely separate product with separate compliance obligations attached, not an add-on toggle on the same check. A company in a regulated industry (money transmission, crypto, lending) comparing Sumsub's $1.35 against Veriff's $0.80 without confirming that both quotes include equivalent screening depth is not comparing the same product — Veriff's own tiering (Essential at $0.80 for unregulated use cases, rising to Hybrid at $1.39 and Premium at $1.89 as regulatory and fraud-risk requirements increase) makes the same point from its own side of the market. The cheapest published rate from any vendor is very likely describing the least regulated tier, not a discount on the same compliance bundle.
What the advertised price misses
- Ongoing monitoring is a separate, recurring cost on top of the initial verification for any vendor offering it, not included in the one-time per-check rate — relevant for any use case (crypto exchanges, money transmitters) that needs continuous rather than point-in-time KYC.
- Persona's confirmed 12-month contract minimum means a company testing the product at low volume commits to a full year of the $250/month floor ($3,000 minimum annual spend) regardless of actual usage in any given month, and unused services within the included 500/month allowance do not carry forward to a lighter month.
- Extended data retention beyond a vendor's default window carries a separate reported charge on Veriff ($0.30–$0.40/verification) — a real, additive cost for any regulated business with multi-year retention obligations.
- Persona's 500 included services per month is not a free tier — it's the allowance bundled into the $250/month Essential fee, and confusing the two would understate Persona's actual floor cost. Persona's separate Startup Program is an eligibility-based discount for qualifying early-stage companies and should not be assumed to apply to a standard Essential signup.
Effective cost per successful verified user
Combining the minimum-commitment distortion and the completion-rate effect: at 1,000 verifications a month with an illustrative 80% completion rate, Veriff's $849 monthly bill (for 1,000 attempts) covers 800 successful users, for an effective $1.06 per successful verification — 33% above its advertised $0.80. The same completion-rate adjustment applied to Sumsub's $1,350 bill (1,000 attempts, 800 successes) gives $1.69 per successful user, and applied to Persona's confirmed $1,000 bill at 1,000 services (800 successes) gives $1.25 per successful user. Each failed or incomplete attempt on Persona still consumes a service against the 500-included allowance or the $1.50 overage rate, exactly as a completed one does — there is no discount for an abandoned check. This adjustment matters more the lower the completion rate, and completion rate itself varies by vendor, document type, and geography in ways no published rate card captures.
Which vendor fits which volume and risk profile
- Low volume, unregulated use case, testing a new product: Veriff, given no published minimum and the lowest entry rate.
- Regulated fintech or crypto business needing AML/sanctions screening from day one: Sumsub Compliance tier ($1.85/check, $299/month minimum) or Veriff Hybrid/Premium, priced against the same regulatory bar rather than against Sumsub's cheaper Basic tier.
- A company wanting deep customization of verification workflows without engineering resources, and willing to accept a 12-month commitment: Persona, whose confirmed $250/month floor and $1.50 overage rate are among the most precisely specified pricing terms of the three, even though the resulting per-service cost is not the cheapest at most of the volumes modeled here.
- High volume (10,000+/month): request enterprise pricing from all three; published list rates are unlikely to be the rate actually charged at this scale, and Veriff's reported enterprise rate ($2–$3/verification) is notably higher than its self-serve $0.80, suggesting the ordering established at low volume doesn't necessarily hold at scale.
Limitations and uncertainty
Veriff's, Sumsub's, and Persona's Essential-tier pricing are all confirmed directly from each vendor's own published documentation. Persona's per-service cost beyond 500/month is calculated precisely from its published $1.50 overage rate; what specifically counts as one "service" (a single check within a broader verification flow) is defined in Persona's own help documentation, but this article does not have a confirmed count of how many services a typical full KYC flow consumes, so the service-count scenarios above should be read as a direct unit cost, not automatically translated into "verified users" without that additional, unconfirmed conversion factor. Enterprise-scale pricing for all three vendors beyond their published self-serve tiers is not published and not modeled beyond the reported Veriff enterprise range and the explicit caveat on Persona's 100,000-service row. Completion-rate and effective-cost-per-successful-user figures in this article are illustrative calculations built on an assumed completion rate, not a vendor-reported statistic.
Sources
Checked late September 2026. Veriff and Sumsub tiered pricing as published on each vendor's own pricing page. Persona: withpersona.com/pricing and Persona's official help documentation on Essential plan pricing (help.withpersona.com), confirming the $250/month rate, 500 included services, $1.50 per-service overage, no rollover, and 12-month minimum term.