What the first answer said: AI and trust cost about USD 0.10, 0.27 and 0.54 per member a month at light, medium and heavy use, with identity checks at USD 18 per 1,000 members.
What checking found: 15% of 1,000 members at USD 1.20 is USD 180, not 18. Corrected totals are about USD 0.26, 0.54 and 0.86 per member a month. The USD 1.20 check price itself was not a published price.
The finding
AI research agents priced each AI and trust feature per unit, then rolled them up for 1,000 active members at light, medium and heavy use: voice onboarding, image scanning, voice moderation, call hosting and identity checks. The first totals were about USD 0.10, 0.27 and 0.54 per member a month.
One line was off by ten. Verifying 15% of 1,000 members at USD 1.20 each costs USD 180, not 18. With that fixed, the totals roughly double to about USD 0.26, 0.54 and 0.86. Identity checks, a one-time cost per member, became the largest single line at every level of use.
In the current model, AI model usage is the biggest cost at about CAD 0.21 per member a month, and total operating cost is about CAD 0.50 per member at 10,000 members.
Why it mattered to the design
The corrected numbers moved attention from infrastructure to models. Peoplarium uses commercial model APIs for the AI planner, the onboarding interview, translation and scam detection, with a cost cap per member. Self-hosted GPUs were deferred because commercial APIs are cheaper at this volume. There is no image generation in the first phase. Verification is paid once per new member, through a vendor with a free monthly tier, so it no longer dominates. The estimate names caching, smaller models for routine tasks and batching as the way to cut model cost by half or more.
How it was checked
Reviewers re-ran the research's arithmetic line by line, found the verification error and recorded corrected totals in Plan v1.0. The USD 1.20 check price could not be found: the self-serve plans of the verification vendor the research named run from USD 0.80 to 1.89 per check with monthly minimums, which we confirmed on its pricing page. The current per-member figures come from Peoplarium's own v2 model, which uses different vendors. They are planning estimates, not results.
Sources
- Self-serve plans and pricing, Veriff. Checked 2026-09-28.