Verifying academic affiliation since 2020

SheerID alternative: a free academic verification API

Looking for a SheerID alternative? Studid is a free, two-endpoint API that verifies students and faculty via their university login — no documents, no contract.

Short answer

If you need to verify students, faculty or researchers and you want an API instead of an enterprise identity-marketing platform, Studid is the developer-first alternative. It is free, has no account or API key, and verifies affiliation through the university login your users already have.

Read the integration guide

Last updated September 13, 2026

70+
Federations: 6,365
Institutions: None
User data stored: 6 yrs
Verifying academics

Powers verification for teams at

Free, no contract

No enterprise plan, no API key, no account — call the API immediately.

Two REST endpoints

Create a verification, redirect the user, poll the result. No SDK or program setup.

Instant, no documents

University SSO only: nothing to upload, no review queue, no identity data stored.

What changes with Studid

Criterion	SheerID	Studid
Onboarding	⚠️ Program setup, API token, sales contact	✅ None — call the API immediately
Pricing	⚠️ Quote-based; no public free plan	✅ Free; fair-use rate limits only
Integration effort	⚠️ SDK/JS library and program configuration	✅ Two REST endpoints
Method	⚠️ Data sources, SSO, email loop, documents	✅ University SSO only
Coverage	✅ Broad consumer segments across 190+ countries (per SheerID)	⚠️ Academic institutions via eduGAIN (70+ federations)
Data stored	⚠️ Verification and permissioned data	✅ None
Failure modes	⚠️ Document review, pending states	✅ Instant — SSO succeeds or fails
Non-academic groups	✅ Military, teachers, first responders	❌ Academic affiliation only

SheerID's pricing and coverage above come from its public materials as of September 2026 — see the sources before deciding.

Your migration is three steps: create a verification, redirect the user to the returned link, then poll the result. The full walkthrough is in the integration guide, and you can watch it work in the live demo.

See the flow you'd ship instead

One redirect, one institutional login, one poll — no program setup, no API key, no contract. Run a real login in under a minute.

Read the integration guide

The whole integration

No SDK, no API key, no account. This is the entire surface area:

# 1. Create a verification → returns { id, link }
curl -X POST https://api.studid.io/v2/auth/verification \
  -H 'Content-Type: application/json' \
  -d '{"secretToken":"YOUR_TOKEN","redirectUrl":"https://yourapp.com/callback","serviceName":"My App"}'

# 2. Redirect the user to `link`, then poll for the result
curl https://api.studid.io/v2/auth/verification/{id} \
  -H 'Authorization: Bearer YOUR_TOKEN'

What you give up

Being narrower is a real trade-off. Studid cannot:

Verify non-academic segments (military, teachers, first responders).
Confirm a user without their participation from an authoritative database.
Fall back to documents when SSO is unavailable — some institutions only issue transient identifiers, in which case authIdentifier is null (the verification is still valid, because entityId is always present).
Verify age or undergraduate/graduate level.

If those matter, a broader platform like SheerID is the right call. If you only need academic affiliation and want to move today, Studid is the lighter path.

Who should choose which

Choose SheerID if:

You are verifying non-academic groups too (military, teachers, first responders) and want one vendor for all of them.
You need to confirm users without their active participation, from authoritative databases or document review.
You want a turnkey campaign program with audience insights, not a raw API.
You already run SheerID and the per-verification cost is justified by its broader coverage.

Choose Studid if:

Your gate is academic affiliation only — students, faculty, staff, researchers or alumni.
You want to call an API today without a sales cycle, contract or program configuration.
You would rather own the flow inside your own product than route users through a hosted portal.
You want to store no identity data, so there is nothing to breach and less to explain in a privacy review.

The full comparison

Why teams look for a SheerID alternative

SheerID is built for consumer brands running gated offers. That is a good product — but it brings assumptions that do not fit every team:

It is a platform, not a primitive. You set up a program, choose steps, and route users through a hosted verification flow. If all you want is "confirm this user is affiliated with a university," that is a lot of surface area.
It is sales-led and enterprise-priced. There is no public free tier to build against.
It optimizes for broad consumer segments — students, military, teachers, first responders — and the correspondingly heavy verification methods (data sources, email loops, document review).
It collects verification and permissioned data as part of the product.

If none of that describes your problem — because you are a developer who needs an academic gate and nothing else — Studid is the narrower, lighter tool.

How a migration looks

You do not need to rip out SheerID to adopt Studid. The pragmatic sequence most teams follow:

Map the decision, not the platform. Write down the question your code actually asks — usually "is this user affiliated with an academic institution?" That is one boolean, and it is the only thing you need to replace.
Replace the verification call. Create a verification with POST /v2/auth/verification, redirect the user to the returned link, and poll GET /v2/auth/verification/{id} until session is populated. There is no program ID or access token to configure.
Wire the result into your existing logic. Read entityId for the institution and, when present, authIdentifier for a stable per-user key. Persist your own session token; Studid stores nothing.
Keep SheerID for the segments Studid does not cover. If you also verify military or teacher status, leave that flow where it is and switch only the academic branch.

For a worked example of the academic branch, see the student discounts use case, which gates a perk on exactly this result.

What an academic gate actually needs

It helps to write down the minimum your product requires, because that list is shorter than a general verification platform assumes:

An affiliation answer. Is this person currently connected to an academic institution? Yes or no.
The institution. Which one, so you can apply per-institution or per-country rules.
A stable handle (optional). A repeatable identifier to attach to an account, when the institution releases one.
Nothing else. No legal identity, no address, no document, no biometric.

Against that list, SheerID's breadth is capability you are paying for but not using. Its data sources, document review and audience segments exist to answer harder questions than the one you asked. Studid is deliberately narrower: it answers the affiliation question and stops.

That narrowness has a second benefit beyond cost. Every extra data point you collect is a liability you must secure, disclose and eventually delete. If the decision is "does this person qualify for the education tier?", the signed institution result is sufficient, and the smaller contract means less to explain in a privacy review.

An evaluation checklist. When comparing the two, test for:

Can you call the API today, without a sales conversation?
What is the per-verification cost at your expected volume?
Does the flow require documents for any academic users?
What data is stored after the check, and for how long?
How does it behave when an institution issues only a transient identifier?

Coexistence: running both

Nothing forces a replacement. The most common arrangement we see is a split by segment:

SheerID keeps the non-academic branches — military, teachers, first responders — where its data sources and document review are genuinely needed.
Studid takes the academic branch, where the institution's own login is the strongest and cheapest proof.
Your code presents one interface to the product, so the user never sees which vendor answered which question.

This keeps each vendor on the part of the problem it is good at, and it means adopting Studid does not require renegotiating or removing the contract you already have. It also keeps the comparison honest: you can measure conversion and cost on the academic branch alone before deciding whether to broaden or narrow the split.

Verify these claims yourself

We would rather you check than take our word for it:

Coverage — see the live network page for institution and federation counts.
Free and rate limits — the exact terms are on the pricing page.
No black box — the open-source better-auth plugin shows exactly how to wire the two endpoints into an authentication flow.
The flow works — run a real institutional login in the live demo.
SheerID claims — its pricing page and developer documentation are the sources for the coverage, pricing and method rows above.

Methodology: Facts about SheerID here come from its public website and developer documentation as of September 2026. Competitor pricing and features change; verify current details before deciding. We are happy to be corrected — contact us.

Frequently asked questions

Is Studid a drop-in replacement for SheerID?

Only for the academic slice of what SheerID does. If your requirement is "confirm this person is affiliated with a real university," Studid replaces that flow. SheerID also covers military, first responders and other segments, and can verify users against authoritative databases or documents — Studid does none of that, by design.

How much does Studid cost?

Nothing. The create and check endpoints are free with no account, API key, credit card or per-verification fee. Fair-use rate limits (100 requests / 60s per IP) protect the service; they are not a paywall.

How long does switching take?

Typically hours, not weeks. There is no program to configure and no SDK: create a verification, redirect the user to the returned link, then poll the result. The integration guide walks through it end to end.

What if we also verify military or teacher status?

Keep a platform like SheerID for non-academic segments and use Studid for the academic ones. The two can coexist — Studid only handles institutional academic affiliation.

Does Studid store user data?

No. Studid never collects documents, never sees a password, and stores no identity data. The user authenticates at their own institution; Studid only reads the signed result and returns an institution identifier and, when available, a privacy-safe authIdentifier.

Swap an enterprise platform for two REST calls

Authenticate with a real university or research institute and see exactly what the API returns — no account needed.

Read the guide