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Student discounts & edu pricing

Verify that a user is an enrolled student, researcher, or faculty member before granting your education discount tier — in seconds, with no document uploads.

The problem

Education discounts are one of the most abused perks on the internet. To qualify, you need to know that the person asking for a 50% student rate is actually a student — but today that means asking users to photograph student ID cards, upload transcripts, or send enrollment letters. All of it is a poor experience, a privacy problem, and trivially easy to fake or resell.

The Studid way

Instead of collecting documents, redirect the user to their own university's login. Their institution digitally signs a SAML assertion confirming who they are and where they belong. Studid translates that assertion into two simple values your pricing logic can read.

Your integration:

  1. Create a verification — POST /v2/auth/verification with your secret token and a callback URL
  2. Redirect the user to the returned link — they pick their university and log in (including any institutional MFA)
  3. Check the result — GET /v2/auth/verification/{id} returns an institution-verified identifier

That's the whole integration. No certificates, no SAML metadata, no federation knowledge required.

What you get

For every user you receive:

  • authIdentifier — a persistent, privacy-safe identifier you can attach to a discount account (or null when the institution only provides transient identifiers)
  • entityId — which institution the user authenticated at (always present)
  • affiliations — the user's role (student, faculty, staff) when the institution releases it

Because the login happens at the institution itself, the user's credentials never touch your servers — and there is nothing a forger can fake, because the university vouches for the login.

Why it works for commerce

  • Instant conversion — no "upload your ID and wait 3 days" step that loses 80% of eligible users
  • Friction-free MFA — if the university requires multi-factor authentication, the user just does it at the university login
  • Global reach — thousands of institutions across 70+ national federations (DFN-AAI, InCommon, RENATER, SWITCHaai, GakuNin, and more)

Get started

See the integration guide for the full API walkthrough, or try the live demo and verify a real institutional login in under a minute.

Works even without a persistent user ID

Some institutions only issue a transient identifier, so authIdentifier can be null. That is a normal outcome, not a failed login: the user still authenticated at a real institution, and entityId always proves which one. Use it for eligibility and bind the result to your own session token for continuity.

Ready to try it?

Authenticate with your university or research institute — no account needed, takes under a minute.

Read the guide