Sanctions screening API cost: estimate your usage

Check your workspace allowance and current usage

Start with the number of people or companies you expect to check. Include new customers, one-off requests, portfolio batches, and repeat checks from monitoring. These completed checks share one production allowance, whether they come from the API or dashboard.

Open Usage & limits and choose your environment. Read your plan in Billing & invoices, then compare it with current pricing. Count completed subjects, not HTTP requests: one batch can check many subjects, while opening saved evidence uses no new screening. This guide helps you build that forecast and keep pending work visible at the cap.

Separate one-time and recurring demand

Model onboarding checks, portfolio reviews, scheduled monitoring, source-triggered rescreens, and corrected-subject operations. Include a realistic margin for growth and policy changes. Do not count an unchanged idempotent replay as a new business subject.

Scheduled monitoring can dominate the workload. Ten thousand retained customers on a daily schedule create roughly 300,000 scheduled rescreens in a 30-day month, before source-triggered activity. That arithmetic describes an illustrative workload, not a price quote or a promise about exact run counts.

Work through a sample monthly workload

Synthetic planning example: 2,000 new subjects, 500 ad hoc checks, and 1,000 monitored subjects checked daily in a 30-day period yield 32,500 planned screens before source-triggered runs and other additions. A six-hour schedule changes that monitor component substantially.

Keep source-triggered demand as an explicit variable instead of silently assuming it is zero. Track actual usage by workflow after launch and refine the forecast.

planned_subjects = onboarding + ad_hoc + portfolio_checks
                 + monitored_subjects * planned_runs_per_subject
                 + source_triggered_rescreens
                 + corrected_subject_operations

Example: 2,000 + 500 + 0 + (1,000 * 30) = 32,500
Add source-triggered and other separately planned activity.

Use the included review workflow

Retained API results appear in SanctionsKit Screening history, and cases can be investigated in Review queue. Retrieve existing results for follow-up rather than submitting another screening just to reopen the evidence. A new identity or required fresh check is a separate screening operation.

Review effort also depends on data quality and policy, not simply the number of alerts. Measure how many cases require additional evidence and how long they remain unresolved. Lowering sensitivity to reduce analyst work can hide missed candidates unless the change is tested against appropriate cases.

Plan for caps and failure handling

Distinguish a temporary rate limit from a plan usage cap, and document the action for each. In SanctionsKit, monitoring shares the allowance with interactive screens and no automatic overages are charged under the published model. A quota issue should not quietly clear a customer or erase a monitoring failure.

Use idempotency for accepted-request retries and isolate failed batch rows. Preserve enough operation state to avoid duplicate work after a timeout. Retention and monitoring obligations also continue to need explicit handling when a relationship ends.

Read usage from your integration

Use a key with usage:read to call GET /api/v1/usage from your backend. The usage documentation describes the returned period, limits, and counters. Use the response to surface approaching limits to your operators before a large batch or monitoring workload starts.

The example reads usage only; it creates no screening. Keep sandbox and production usage separate because the key selects the environment. Inspect the current response fields rather than calculating remaining allowance from HTTP request logs.

curl --fail-with-body --max-time 15 \
  https://www.sanctionskit.com/api/v1/usage \
  --header "Authorization: Bearer $SANCTIONSKIT_API_KEY"

Calculate analyst workload alongside screening volume

For a synthetic planning scenario, assume 20,000 completed checks, 200 cases requiring review and an average of eight active review minutes per case. That is about 26.7 analyst hours before independent approvals, evidence requests and operational administration. The example is arithmetic, not an estimate of SanctionsKit’s alert rate or a staffing recommendation.

Replace the assumptions with the work your team sees in Review queue. Separate active handling time from time waiting for documents, and distinguish cases from individual candidates. Review the available Operations reports alongside your team’s own handling-time records; the screening allowance does not measure reviewer hours.

Reconcile the forecast with actual activity

Compare the forecast with Usage & limits after normal onboarding, a batch, and scheduled monitoring have run. Check the intended monitor population against Monitoring, review failed batch rows, and account for corrected subjects that required new operations. Investigate a difference before assuming it is an extra charge.

Run a low, expected and high activity scenario using your own assumptions. For the high case, consider a portfolio refresh coinciding with recurring monitoring. Use current SanctionsKit pricing for the actual allowance and commercial terms; this worksheet does not quote a future price or imply that a requested workload has been performance-qualified.

Frequently asked questions