"This can't be real. How are they only charging $5?"

I've spent most of my career around background screening. When I founded VerticalRent, our rental-management platform, I learned exactly what a background check costs to run — right down to the penny. So it never sat right with me to watch nonprofits get charged enterprise prices to screen the very volunteers who keep their missions alive.

Think about who that hits hardest: the youth sports league run by parents on weekends. The food bank stretching every dollar. The little church with a children's ministry and a shoestring budget. These are the groups doing some of the most important work in our communities — and they were being asked to choose between protecting the people they serve and keeping the lights on. The price of a background check should never be the reason a willing, qualified volunteer goes unscreened.

So we built VolunteerBadge: rigorous, FCRA-compliant background checks, done right — at a price made for nonprofit budgets, not enterprise ones. Five dollars a check. No monthly fees. No surprises.

Yes, the margins really are razor thin. We're at peace with that.

I'll be transparent in a way most screening companies never are: our margin on a $5 check is honestly razor thin. That's not a loss-leader trick or an introductory rate that balloons later. It's a deliberate decision. We consider it our duty to give nonprofits across the country the same quality of screening the big enterprises pay a premium for — at a fraction of the cost.

We can do it because we're not a bloated legacy vendor with a commissioned sales team and a building full of overhead. We're a focused team that already runs the screening infrastructure for our other products. VolunteerBadge rides on top of that, so the savings go to you instead of to a middleman.

We took identity verification further than anyone else in volunteer screening.

Here's the uncomfortable truth about most volunteer background checks: they search a name, a date of birth, and a Social Security number — but they never confirm the human filling out the form is actually that person. A bad actor can borrow a clean identity and sail right through.

We refused to ship that gap. VolunteerBadge is the only online volunteer screening platform that ties a real, verified identity to every application — a live biometric selfie matched against a government photo ID, then triangulated against the Social Security trace and address history behind the check. If the person and the identity don't line up, you'll know before anyone gets near your kids, your clients, or your congregation.

And when a record turns up, we don't hand you a guess.

When our searches surface a possible criminal record, a real reviewer verifies whether it actually belongs to your applicant — checking the identifiers, the dates, the jurisdiction. When it's warranted, we go straight to the associated county court's own website and pull the record by hand to confirm it's real and it's truly your volunteer. If we can't confidently validate that a record is theirs, we don't dump it on you as a scary "possible match," and we don't bill you for a result we couldn't stand behind. We refund the check. No games, no guessing.

Here's the part the industry doesn't advertise: most checks come back clean.

About 94% of the volunteer checks we run come back all clear — no hits, no records, nothing reportable. That isn't a knock on volunteers; it's simply the reality of screening the kind of people who show up to help. So let me ask the honest question the rest of the industry would rather you didn't: when the overwhelming majority of reports are clean, what exactly justifies paying $20, $30, or $40 a check?

Meanwhile, the industry has a knack for making a check feel worth the price by surfacing a minor traffic citation or two. I'd rather pull the curtain back and be straight with you: a clean report is the most common result there is, and confirming that a willing volunteer is safe to serve should never cost a small fortune. Save that budget for the things that actually move your mission — more volunteers, more programs, more people served.

So pay us $5 per check — or less when you buy credits in bulk. For that $5 you get biometric facial recognition, a government-ID match, an SSN trace, county-level verification when it's needed, a free volunteer application, and a built-in FCRA-compliant workflow. All of it. Our margins are crazy thin, and we're genuinely at peace with that — we make it up on volume, and on the quiet satisfaction of serving the nonprofits who do the hard work.

And we're only getting started. Over time we'll keep adding tools that help you run more of your organization right here — from managing volunteers to tracking hours to building the reports your funders want to see. All in the same place, at the same honest prices.

Thank you for trusting us with something as important as the safety of the people you serve. I read every piece of feedback personally — so if there's anything we can do better, email me directly.