Guest and tenant screening alternatives: per booking, per report, per verification, or $0.75 a check

What we sell, and where to start on this page

Checktiv is identity and background screening for guests and tenants. You choose which checks run on a template, you pay per check, and one screening is one person checked. Identity verification is $0.75 a person, a watchlist check is $1.00, US criminal background is $5.00 and global background is $2.00. The whole list is on our price list and no account is needed to read it. Two entries on that list, e-signature and address verification, are not checks you can run today.

Every account opens with $5 of wallet credit that lasts 14 days, with no card and no sales call, and it spends on real checks rather than test ones. Before that there is a test account with no billing in it at all, where every check runs free. In test mode you pick the result of each check in advance, so what it rehearses is your own setup and not what a real check returns.

If you have not settled what to buy yet, start with the guest screening guide: it names no vendor and sets out which question each check answers, and what an applicant has to give you before each one can be asked.

None of these prices are in the same unit

Several of the vendors here publish a price, and no two of them charge for the same thing. One charges per booking. One charges per report. Our parent brand charges per verification. We charge per check, and one screening is one person checked. Those figures do not divide into each other, and a table that lined them up without saying so would be worse than no table.

There is one unit that works, and it is the one your own spreadsheet needs: what it costs you to screen one person. Every published price converts into it the same way, by multiplying or dividing by a fact about your own operation. How many people are on a booking. How many applicants one report covers. Where your volume lands inside a published band, and what fixed fee is sitting beside it. How many checks you put in one workflow. Not one of those numbers is a fact about the vendor, and not one of them can appear on a price list.

That is why the table carries a column for it. Of the vendors here, the number whose published price converts into a cost per person screened using only figures that vendor publishes is zero. That is not an accusation and it is not a gap any of them could close, because in every case the missing number is yours and not theirs. What separates these vendors is not the size of the figure they print. It is how much of your own operation you have to know before that figure means anything.

Three questions do the whole job, on any price list. What is the unit. What do you have to supply to convert it. Is there a fixed fee beside the per-unit figure that the figure does not include. The cost per screening worksheet turns those answers into one number, and it prices any vendor whose figures you can read, including us.

Where these vendors are the better buy

Buying from one of these vendors instead of us is a real outcome, and for some of the operators reading this it is the correct one. If your decision turns on something one of them sells and we do not, buy it from them. You will be right, and finding that out here beats finding it out four weeks into a setup.

There are vendors in this market that are not on this page, because no dated reading of their site exists yet. A row we could not source would be worse than no table at all, which is the whole premise of this page. When one is read, it gets the same columns, the same dates and the same source markers as every row in the table below.

How to read the table

One row per vendor, ours in it on the same terms as everyone else's, and the full list of checks behind our row is on our price list. Column four is the one to read first: it names, vendor by vendor, the fact about your own operation you have to supply before that vendor's figure means anything.

Two rules govern every cell. A cell is either sourced to a page we read on a stated date, or it reads not published, which means we looked on that date and did not find it on that site. Not published is a statement about what a visitor can see from outside, never about what a company does or why. We opened no account with any vendor here, so anything visible only after signup is not in this table.

How any product here, ours included, is classified under United States consumer reporting law is a question for your counsel, and any vendor's answer to it should come from that vendor.