The question we get most
Why is it only $5?
Because the honest answer is more convincing than a reassurance. Most vendors charge $30 to $50 for a volunteer check. We charge $5 for one that searches more sources, and we publish every one of them. Here is exactly where the difference comes from, including the part where our approach is genuinely worse.
What you are paying for in a $40 check
Very little of a traditional volunteer check is the data. The data is close to a commodity. What costs money is everything wrapped around it: the salesperson who quoted you, the account manager assigned to your contract, the per-county court runner dispatched for each search, and the margin the whole arrangement has to carry. Strip those out and the floor is much lower than the market price suggests.
A typical volunteer check
$40.00
Hover, tap or tab through any block to see what that part of the price actually buys.
A VolunteerBadge check
$5.00
Four of the five blocks in a $40 check are not the search. The search — the green one — is around a tenth of what you pay.
Pick a block to see where the rest of the money goes.
Proportions are illustrative of a typical mid-market volunteer check, not audited figures from any one vendor. The shape is the point: in a traditional check, most of the price sits outside the search.
We did not build a screening company for nonprofits. We repointed one.
From 2011 to 2019 we operated VerticalRent, a tenant-screening platform that processed hundreds of thousands of FCRA-regulated background checks for landlords nationwide. Everything expensive about running a screening company got built and paid for during those years: the search and match logic, the identity resolution, the deduplication, the adjudication rules, the adverse-action workflow, the audit trail, the compliance posture.
A startup building that from scratch has to recover it, and the only place to recover it from is the price of a check. We had already amortized it against a completely different market. When we turned the engine toward volunteer screening, the development cost was a sunk cost rather than a line item in your invoice.
That is the single largest reason the number is $5 and not $25. It is also not a reason anyone can copy quickly, which is the honest answer to “why doesn’t everyone do this?”
How we are certified and regulatedAggregated data, not a courier per county
This is the real mechanical difference, and it cuts both ways. Here is the trade honestly.
Live per-county search
What the $40 buys
Someone queries a specific courthouse at the moment you ask. Current to that instant, including a case filed yesterday.
- Costs real money per county, per search
- Takes hours to days
- Only searches the counties you thought to name — and that depends on the address history being right
Aggregated multi-jurisdictional
What the $5 buys
A continuously refreshed index of 3,241 sources, searched all at once. The acquisition cost is spread across everybody who searches it.
- Returns in minutes, usually same day
- Searches everywhere rather than where you guessed
- Refreshes on a cycle, so a record filed this morning may wait for the next refresh
We do not pretend the freshness gap does not exist. What we do is close the part of it that matters: anything that comes back gets county-level confirmation, pulled by hand where a court requires it, before it is ever reported to you. The aggregated index is how we find a record cheaply. The county is where we prove it.
And breadth is the failure mode that actually bites in volunteer screening. The typical miss is not a case filed last Tuesday. It is a person who offended in a state they left eight years ago, screened only where they live now. By the Justice Department’s own review, a state-only check misses roughly 29% of volunteers with criminal histories. We take that statistic apart here — including the inflated 42% version our own industry prefers to quote.
Do not take the coverage on faith
Every source we search is published by name, type, jurisdiction and refresh cadence. No form, no sign-up, no NDA. Ask your current provider for the same list in writing and see what happens.
- 3,241
- sources, published by name
- 92.2%
- refresh on a monthly cycle
- 189 / 200
- sex-offender registries refresh weekly
The part nobody in our industry says out loud
The overwhelming majority of volunteer checks come back clear. That is the good news, and it is also where the money is made. A vendor charging $40 charges it every time, including the many, many times the answer is simply nothing found. You are paying a premium price, over and over, for the cheapest possible outcome to produce.
A clear result on an aggregated engine costs almost nothing to generate. So we price near that floor instead of near what the market will bear. The consequence is not subtle: at $40 a check, a youth program with 200 volunteers spends $8,000 and screens the people it is most nervous about. At $5, the same program screens everybody — including the parent who volunteered to drive on Saturday.
That is the actual product. Not a cheaper check. A screened roster instead of a screened department.
Where our approach is the wrong tool
- You need certainty about the last 72 hours. If a filing that recent is decisive for you, a live county search is the right instrument and we will say so.
- Your state mandates fingerprint-based checks. Some roles legally require an FBI or state-police fingerprint check. A name-based check, at any price, does not substitute for one.
- You need credit, driving or employment verification. That is a different product category and we do not pretend otherwise.
If one of these is you, the responsible answer is that $5 is not the right purchase, and we would rather tell you that than sell you the wrong thing.
Straight answers
Is a $5 background check a real background check?
Yes. One $5 check covers identity verification, a nationwide criminal search across 650M+ county, state and federal court records, county-level confirmation of anything that comes back, and a sex-offender registry search across all 50 states. Every one of the 3,241 sources behind it is published by name at volunteerbadge.com/sources, with no form and no NDA.
How can you charge $5 when other vendors charge $30 to $50?
Three reasons. The screening engine was built and paid for between 2011 and 2019 running tenant checks, so VolunteerBadge did not have to fund it. We buy aggregated multi-jurisdictional data rather than dispatching a court runner to a county for every single search. And we have no sales team, no account managers, no minimums and no per-seat fees, which is where a large share of a traditional vendor’s price actually goes.
What is the catch?
There is a real trade-off, and it is a data-freshness one rather than a coverage one. An aggregated database refreshes on a cycle instead of querying a courthouse at the instant you ask, so a record filed this morning may not surface until that source’s next refresh. We publish the cadence: 92.2% of sources refresh monthly, and 189 of our 200 sex-offender registry sources refresh weekly.
Is the software free too, or is that where the cost is hidden?
The volunteer management software is free and stays free — applications, compliance rosters, adverse-action workflow, re-screening alerts, hour tracking, waivers and opportunity listings. There is no platform fee, no contract and no minimum. The $5 check is the only thing we charge for.
Who actually runs the checks?
ScreenForge Labs, LLC — operator of VolunteerBadge — is the consumer reporting agency, and has obtained its FCRA Certificate from the Consumer Data Industry Association.
Go and check us
- All 3,241 sources, by nameFilterable by state and source type. No gate.
- Anatomy of a $5 checkWhat one search actually touches, step by step.
- What screening actually catchesWe take apart the statistics our own industry repeats.
- FCRA Certificate and complianceWho the consumer reporting agency is, and what it is certified to do.
- Trust CenterSecurity, data handling and how disputes work.
- PricingThe whole thing on one page. There is not much to it.
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