How Much Does Sanctions Screening Cost? Pricing Models Compared
Sanctions screening costs $0.20 a check; monitoring runs $0.07 to $12 per name a year. Published August 2026 vendor prices, hidden costs, worked example.
Screening one name against global sanctions lists costs €0.10 to $0.20 per check on published August 2026 pricing. Keeping that name under continuous monitoring costs anywhere from $0.07 to $12 per year depending on the vendor: a 170× spread for what is, at the data layer, close to the same thing.
That spread is the most useful fact in this post, because it is not a data-quality difference. It is a difference in how much is wrapped around the data. This post prices both layers, using list prices verified on 7 August 2026.
How much does sanctions screening cost?
For a one-off check, €0.10 to $0.20. For continuous monitoring of a customer book, published rates run from $0.07 per name per year at the API end of the market to about $12 per name per year for a full compliance platform. A business monitoring 500 customers can pay anywhere between $35 and $2,388 a year depending on which of those they buy.
The three numbers that determine your bill: how many names you monitor, how often each is re-screened, and (the one most buyers miss) whether you are purchasing a screening API or a compliance system. Those are different products at wildly different prices, and vendor marketing rarely distinguishes them.
What are the sanctions screening pricing models?
Six, in practice. Vendors seldom name which one they use, so the fastest way to read a quote is to work out which meter is running.
| Model | How it works | Who it suits | Where it bites |
|---|---|---|---|
| Per screen (per API call) | A fixed fee per screening request, e.g. €0.10–$0.20 | Predictable volumes; one-off due diligence; teams wiring screening into a single flow | If re-screens are billed as new checks, monitoring cadence becomes a direct cost multiplier |
| Flat annual monitoring fee | A one-time yearly charge per monitored name, separate from the screening fee | Anyone who wants continuous monitoring without metering each re-screen | Covers the data only: case handling, workflow and audit are yours to build |
| Committed volume tiers (per monitored entity) | You commit to a minimum entity count; a per-entity monthly rate applies, falling as the commitment rises | Businesses with a stable book needing monitoring plus review workflow in one system | You pay the commitment whether you use it or not, and dormant customers keep billing until deactivated |
| Per seat | A fixed fee per named platform user | Manual review teams living in the vendor UI | API access is often priced separately; "seat" may mean named, concurrent or departmental |
| Flat enterprise licence | A negotiated annual fee, often bundling data licence and support | Large institutions, on-premise or data-residency needs | Opaque, with no public benchmark to negotiate against and multi-year uplift clauses |
| Hybrid | Subscription covering a baseline volume, plus per-unit overage | Steady base with seasonal spikes | Overage rates frequently exceed the rate the subscription implies |
What is published sanctions screening pricing in August 2026?
More vendors publish than the category's reputation suggests. These figures are quoted from each vendor's live pricing page, verified 7 August 2026.
| Vendor | Model | Published price | Free tier | Minimum |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Didit | Per screen + flat annual monitoring | $0.20 per check; $0.07 per user/year monitoring (daily re-screen) | 500 checks/month, indefinitely | None: no contract, no setup fee |
| OpenSanctions | Per screen | €0.10 per query, hosted API | 30-day trial | None published |
| ComplyAdvantage | Committed volume tiers | $99/mo (100 entities) → $319/mo (2,000), annual billing | No | 100 entities; overage at 1.5× |
| DeRisk Hub | Committed volume tiers | $0.40 → $0.32 per entity/mo (Starter); $0.80 → $0.57 (Professional), annual billing | 15 days, 100 entities, no credit card required | 100 entities; overage at 1.0× |
| sanctions.io | Quote (calculator-gated) | Not published: calculator requires contact details; Enterprise starts at 25,000+ monthly screenings | Trial offered | Not published |
| LSEG World-Check, Dow Jones | Enterprise licence | Not published | No | Not published |
At matched commitments, the two committed-volume vendors compare like this (annual billing, monthly cost):
| Monitored entities | DeRisk Hub Starter | DeRisk Hub Professional | ComplyAdvantage Essentials |
|---|---|---|---|
| 100 | $40 | $80 | $99 |
| 500 | $180 | $360 | $199 |
| 1,000 | $340 | $680 | $269 |
| 2,000 | $640 | $1,280 | $319 |
DeRisk Hub is the cheaper platform up to 500 monitored entities. ComplyAdvantage is materially cheaper from 1,000 up, because their volume curve bends down harder than ours. Feature scope differs, and neither of us publishes enough for a full like-for-like comparison. Treat this as the price axis only.
Why does monitoring cost $0.07 a year from one vendor and $12 from another?
Because they are selling different products. At $0.07 per name per year you are buying a data feed and a re-screen job. A match arrives via API, and everything after that (triage, review, decision, evidence, escalation) is yours to build and staff. At $12 per name per year you are buying a system of record: matching plus case management, reviewer assignment, decision justification, an immutable audit trail, and role-based access.
Both are legitimate purchases. Which one you need depends on a question that has nothing to do with price: when an examiner asks why you cleared a specific customer two years ago, what produces the answer? If the answer is "our own internal tooling," the API is the right buy and the cheap number is real. If the answer is "we'd have to reconstruct it," the difference between $0.07 and $12 is the cost of not having to.
The trap is buying the first and assuming it does the second.
A related warning: do not compare vendors on headline list counts. One vendor advertises 1,300+ lists; other vendors publish far smaller-sounding numbers. That's largely a counting-convention difference, since a single jurisdiction's sanctions programme can be counted as one list or as forty. Check that the specific lists you are legally obliged to screen are covered, and ignore the headline number entirely.
What does sanctions screening cost a real fintech?
Take the case the question usually comes from: 50,000 existing customers, onboarding 3,000 a month, continuous monitoring across the book. Average monitored population in year one is about 68,000.
| Cost line | Didit | OpenSanctions hosted API |
|---|---|---|
| Back-book sweep (50,000) | $10,000 | €5,000 |
| New onboarding (36,000/yr) | $7,200 | €3,600 |
| Continuous monitoring | $4,760 (68,000 × $0.07) | €81,600 if re-screened monthly and each re-screen is billed |
| Year-1 total | ≈ $22,000 | ≈ €90,200 |
Both committed-volume platforms are off their published curves at this scale, so neither has an honest number to quote here. ComplyAdvantage's published tiers stop at 2,000 entities and DeRisk Hub's at 20,000. Above those, everyone negotiates.
Two things follow. First, if the meter bills each re-screen, cadence, not customer count, drives the bill. A flat annual monitoring fee removes that risk entirely, which is why it exists. Second, and more importantly:
The software is no longer the big number
Annual false-positive cost = alerts per day × minutes per alert ÷ 60 × loaded hourly analyst cost × working days per year
To illustrate the shape (these are assumptions, not measurements), a team clearing 40 alerts a day at 12 minutes each burns 8 analyst-hours daily. That is one full-time reviewer, roughly $75,000 a year fully loaded, against a $22,000 software bill for the same book. Review labour costs more than three times the screening.
Industry write-ups routinely put AML alert false-positive rates at 90–95%. Treat that as an order of magnitude rather than a benchmark. It is repeated far more often than it is independently measured, and usually conflates transaction monitoring with name screening. We are measuring our own and will publish the numbers rather than borrow someone else's.
The practical consequence: once screening data costs cents, the only vendor decision that actually moves cost is the one that changes your alert volume and your minutes-per-alert. Threshold control, match quality and review workflow are worth more than any per-check discount.
What costs are not in the quote?
| Hidden cost | What happens | What to ask before signing |
|---|---|---|
| False-positive review labour | Analyst time on alerts that are not real matches, routinely the largest line in the programme | What alert volume should I expect at my book size, and can I tune thresholds myself? |
| The workflow you now have to build | A cheap screening API leaves case management, audit trail and retention as your engineering problem | What exists beyond the match response? |
| Monitoring billed as re-screens | Ongoing monitoring metered as new screening events | Is monitoring a flat fee, included, or metered per re-screen? |
| Overage multipliers | ComplyAdvantage's published Starter terms bill additional monitored entities at 1.5× the per-unit rate next cycle; DeRisk Hub bills overage at the committed rate | What is the multiplier, and when does it apply? |
| Data licensing | Open datasets often bar commercial use. OpenSanctions publishes under Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial; commercial use needs a bulk data licence | Is list data included or licensed separately? |
| Adverse media and PEP as separate SKUs | Priced as add-ons to a sanctions-only base | Is the quoted price sanctions-only? |
| Minimum terms and uplifts | Headline rates often require annual invoicing and multi-year commitment | What is the minimum term and the annual uplift clause? |
| Zombie entities | Churned customers keep billing until explicitly deactivated | What state must an entity be in to stop billing? |
Where does DeRisk Hub sit?
DeRisk Hub is a compliance platform priced per active entity per month, on committed volume tiers, with no per-screen charge. Re-screening as often as your plan's monitoring frequency allows costs nothing extra: only the entity count is metered. Published rates, live as of 7 August 2026 on the DeRisk Hub pricing page:
| Plan | Commitment | Per entity / month (annual billing) | Monitoring frequency |
|---|---|---|---|
| Starter | 100 – 2,000 | $0.40 → $0.32 | Daily |
| Professional | 100 – 20,000 | $0.80 → $0.57 | Hourly |
| Enterprise | Custom | Quoted | Down to every 5 minutes |
Monthly billing runs about 25% above the annual rate. Overage bills at your committed tier's rate, with no penalty multiplier.
Where we are the wrong answer, plainly. If you need raw screening and monitoring with no case workflow, Didit's published $0.20 per check and $0.07 per user per year is far cheaper than us. We would not argue otherwise. Above roughly 500 monitored entities, ComplyAdvantage's published Starter pricing beats ours on the price axis alone. If you have engineering capacity and no budget, self-hosting OpenSanctions' open-source yente (two containers, 8GB RAM) costs a data licence and your own time. And we do not offer adverse media screening at all.
Where the platform earns its price is the layer the cheap options leave to you: case management, reviewer assignment, decision justification, and an immutable audit trail written on every state change. Starter, our entry tier, already includes all of that, plus a built-in AI compliance assistant that explains match reasoning in plain language and speeds up review. None of it is held back for a higher plan. These are the things that answer an examiner's question two years later without a reconstruction project.
Frequently asked questions
Is there free sanctions screening?
Yes, genuinely. Didit publishes 500 free checks a month indefinitely with no card required. OpenSanctions publishes its consolidated dataset under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial licence and open-sources yente, its API server, so a technical team can self-host at zero software cost; commercial use requires a paid bulk data licence. Free covers the data and the check. It does not cover review labour, workflow, or audit defensibility, which is where the money actually goes.
Do I pay for re-screening under ongoing monitoring? It depends on the meter, and there are three answers. Under per-screen pricing, every re-screen is billable, so cadence drives the bill. Under a flat annual monitoring fee, you pay once per name per year regardless of cadence. Under per-monitored-entity pricing, re-screening is included in the entity fee. Ask which one you are buying. Quotes rarely say unprompted.
What is a typical per-entity price for sanctions screening? On published August 2026 prices, $0.07 per name per year at the API end, rising to roughly $1.90–$12 per entity per year for a committed-volume compliance platform: the low end being a 2,000-entity commitment and the high end a 100-entity one on monthly billing. The gap reflects scope, not data quality. Above 20,000 monitored entities no vendor in this comparison publishes a rate.
Does a higher price mean better matching? No, and there is no published evidence either way. Match quality depends on normalization, transliteration handling and threshold tuning, none of which correlate with list price. Test it by screening known-positive control names during evaluation, not by reading the price sheet.
Why do some vendors still hide pricing? Volume discounting is easier to defend privately, and scope varies enough that a single number invites unfavourable comparison. Didit, ComplyAdvantage, OpenSanctions and DeRisk Hub all publish theirs in full. A vendor that won't should be asked why.
Citations
- Didit, Pricing: $0.20/check AML screening, $0.07/user/year monitoring, 500 free checks/month (verified 7 August 2026), https://didit.me/pricing/
- Didit, AML Screening product page (verified 7 August 2026), https://didit.me/products/aml-screening/
- ComplyAdvantage, Starter Plan: $99–$319/mo, 100-entity minimum, 1.5× overage (verified 7 August 2026), https://complyadvantage.com/starter-plan/
- OpenSanctions, Screening API: €0.10 per query (verified 7 August 2026), https://www.opensanctions.org/api/
- OpenSanctions, Licensing: CC BY-NC data; commercial bulk licence required, https://www.opensanctions.org/licensing/
- OpenSanctions, Self-hosted yente: deployment requirements, https://www.opensanctions.org/docs/self-hosted/
- sanctions.io, Pricing calculator and knowledge-base pricing article: no figures published as of 7 August 2026; Enterprise from 25,000+ monthly screenings, https://www.sanctions.io/pricing-calculator
- DeRisk Hub pricing, https://deriskhub.com/pricing
Price the whole programme, not the check
The screening check has commoditised. The review queue has not, and neither has the burden of proving to an examiner why you made a decision. If you are comparing vendors, ask what the alert volume will be, who reviews it, and what produces the evidence afterwards, then compare prices.
DeRisk Hub publishes its rates in full, meters entities rather than screens, bills overage at your committed rate, and writes every decision to an audit trail. See the tiers at DeRiskHub.com/pricing, start your free trial, or go to DeRiskHub.com. Earlier in the process? Start with what sanctions screening is and which lists you actually need to screen against.
All third-party prices were verified against the vendors' published pages on 7 August 2026 and are quoted for comparison only. Vendor pricing changes frequently. Confirm current rates directly before relying on any figure here. DeRisk Hub publishes this comparison and DeRisk Hub is our product.