One of these is free forever. One of them has no number yet, and we are going to say so.

The three things somebody could charge you for

Checking a proof

Free. Forever. Structurally.

Not a promotion, not an introductory rate, and not a decision we could quietly reverse next year. There is no authenticated seam anywhere on the verification path to meter — no account to attach a bill to, no key to count against, no request that identifies who is checking. The price and the privacy property fall out of the same fact, which is why one cannot be changed without giving up the other. The structural argument in full.

Issuing a credential

Metered per production credential issued. Test issuance is unlimited and free.

The price is NOT SET. That is the whole honest answer today. The metering unit is settled and stated above so that when a number does land you already know exactly what it will be multiplied by — and so that you can model the shape of the bill now, with your own volumes, without asking anybody. What you will not find on this page is a form that trades your email address for a figure, because we do not have the figure to trade.

Holding a proof

Free to the person. There is no plan under which that changes.

PLANNED A person never pays to hold or show a credential. The honest complication is that the wallet a person would install from an app store is not shipped, so today the thing that is free is also the thing that is unfinished — and the row above says so in the register's own words rather than ours.

Why the blank is the honest answer

A price printed before anyone is accountable for it is a number that gets quietly revised the first time it meets a real customer. We would rather be the company whose pricing page said nothing than the company whose pricing page said something and then did not mean it.

There is a second reason, and it is less noble: pricing is the owner's call and he has not made it. Saying that plainly costs us a lead or two. Saying anything else would cost us the only thing this website is actually built to be worth.

When the number lands it will land here, dated, and the change will be recorded where changes are recorded — including if it goes up.

What is not priced, and what is not even scoped

Four things a buyer will reasonably ask about have no number, and they are not all missing for the same reason. The distinction matters, so here it is drawn.

• Issuance

  Unit defined, price not set. This is a decision waiting to be made, not a capability waiting to be built.

• Support and response times

  Not priced, because there is no SLA today and we will not blur alerting into one. A tier that promised a response time would be selling something we have not built.

• Volume and commitment terms

  Not scoped. There is no discount ladder, no minimum, and no annual commitment to describe, because there is no unit price for any of them to modify.

• Onboarding

  Not priced, and it is currently a person on our side rather than a form. That is a cost we carry today and one we would rather remove than bill for.

Check the free half yourself

The claim that verification cannot be metered is checkable, and it is the only claim on this page that can be. Two measurements carry it.

curl -s https://id.orbis.id/openapi.json | jq '[.paths[][]["x-auth"]] | group_by(.) | map({(.[0]): length}) | add'

curl -s https://id.orbis.id/.well-known/openid-credential-issuer | jq .
curl -s -D- -o /dev/null https://id.orbis.id/status/1 | grep -i content-type

There is no equivalent command for the issuance price, and it would be dishonest to build a widget that implied there was.

What you would actually be buying today.

curl -s https://id.orbis.id/api/site/register | jq -r '.entries[].slug'

Straight answers

Can you give me a range, or a ballpark?

No. A range is a price with deniability attached, and it would anchor your budget on a number nobody here has approved. When there is a figure it will be one figure, printed on this page, with the date it was set.

Then how do I budget for this?

Multiply your own production issuance volume by an unknown, and note that the two recurring costs most vendors bill for — every verification, and every person holding a credential — are structurally zero here rather than discounted to zero. That is a genuinely different shape of bill, and it is the part you can model today.

Will verification ever start costing money?

Not without rebuilding the verification path to have something meterable on it, which would mean building the account and the log that this design exists to avoid. It is not a pricing commitment held in place by goodwill; it is held in place by the architecture, and you can check the architecture.

Is test issuance really unlimited?

That is the stated metering unit: production credentials are counted, test issuance is not. It is worth being precise about what that buys you today — the endpoints are open and take no key, and the practical limit right now is that getting your own issuer provisioned still involves a human on our side.

What is the cost of leaving?

One DNS record, and every credential you ever issued keeps verifying. The exit, in full. We would rather earn the renewal than hold the hostage — and publishing that before publishing a price is deliberate.