transparent, pay-as-you-go
Pricing
Pay only for what you use, billed per photo processed — never per face. Pegged to AWS Rekognition and priced well below it. No subscription, no minimum usage, no surprise bills.
Real-time
Synchronous REST. Send a photo, get the result in the response.
- •Single image per call, base64 or URL
- •Blocks until processed — answer in the HTTP response
- •Zero queueing delay; served by an always-warm fleet
Standard (batch)
POPULARSend up to 1,000 photos in one call. Results via webhook.
- •URL-only — fire-and-forget, we ack instantly
- •Per-photo result delivered to your webhook
- •Lower price because it's deferrable
Search by face-id
Pure vector lookup against a face you already indexed.
- •Same low rate as batch indexing
- •Real-time response
Storage
Keep your indexed face-vectors searchable.
- •Charged daily, pro-rated — smooth burn
- •Only pay while vectors are stored
do the math
Estimate your monthly cost
Punch in your expected volumes. The estimate updates live.
Monthly estimate
1 credit = $0.00001. Failed photos (unreachable URL, access denied, corrupt image) are never charged. A photo with 0 faces is a valid, charged result. One photo per request, so the price above is what a single API call costs — except /v1/compare, which takes two images and is charged for both.
worked examples
What real workloads cost
Three shapes we see often. Volumes are illustrative — every figure below is calculated from the rates above, so they move when the rates move.
A single wedding gallery
3,000 photos indexed once, 120 guests each running a selfie search.
- Batch indexing
- $1.86
- Selfie searches
- $0.07
- Storage / month
- $0.05
- Total
- $1.99
Same processing on AWS Rekognition Group-1 rates: $3.75
An event-photography business
40 events a month at 2,500 photos each, 60 guest searches per event.
- Batch indexing
- $62.00
- Selfie searches
- $1.49
- Storage / month
- $1.80
- Total
- $65.29
Same processing on AWS Rekognition Group-1 rates: $125.00
KYC selfie verification
20,000 signups a month, each a real-time 1:1 compare (2 images per check).
- Real-time processing
- $37.20
- Total
- $37.20
Same processing on AWS Rekognition Group-1 rates: $50.00
how billing actually works
The details behind the rate
A per-photo price only tells you what you are charged. These are the questions that decide what you actually spend.
What exactly counts as one billable unit?
One photo processed. Not one face, not one API call, not one month. A photo containing eight faces costs the same as a photo containing one, and a photo containing zero faces is a valid, successful, charged result — because the detection work happened either way. Compare is the one operation that can charge twice: it takes a source and a target, and each IMAGE it processes is billable — so two images cost two photos, while a side you supply as a precomputed embedding is not a processed photo and is not charged as one.
Why is batch cheaper than real-time for the same work?
Real-time ($0.00093) blocks until the answer is in your HTTP response, which means we hold always-warm capacity for you. Batch ($0.00062) is deferrable — you hand us up to 1,000 photo URLs, we acknowledge instantly and deliver per-photo results to your webhook. You are paying for latency, not for accuracy: both paths run the same model and return the same scores.
Do I pay for a failed call?
No. If a call fails before any processing work happens, the reserved credits are returned automatically. A photo we successfully processed that simply contained no face is different — that is a real result and it is charged. If our own infrastructure failed the call, you are not charged for it.
What happens when my balance runs out mid-job?
The API returns 402 Payment Required rather than failing silently or queueing work you did not authorise. Every billable response also carries an X-Credits-Remaining header, so you can watch the balance fall inline instead of polling. Optional auto-recharge tops the wallet up before a long batch drains it.
Is there a minimum, a subscription, or a commitment?
No minimum usage and no commitment: credits are prepaid, they do not expire on a monthly cycle, there is no subscription to cancel, and nothing auto-renews unless you switch on auto-recharge yourself. New accounts start with free credits, so you can run a real integration end to end before paying anything. The one floor is the purchase itself — paid top-ups start at $10; your account may be configured with a higher minimum, which is enforced at checkout.
Does storage cost extra?
Yes, separately from processing: $6 per million stored face vectors per month, charged daily and pro-rated, so deleting a collection stops the cost the same day rather than at a billing boundary. Creating a collection is free — only face operations and stored vectors are billable.
How do credits map to dollars?
1 credit = $0.00001, so 100,000 credits = $1. Rates are quoted in USD and billed in USD. Dodo Payments is the Merchant of Record and handles checkout, tax and card data — SightRadar never touches card details.
Comparing against a specific provider? See SightRadar vs AWS Rekognition, vs Azure Face API or vs self-hosting. Migrating an existing integration? The migration guide is a two-line change.