What the older services never got round to building
This is not a complaint about any particular company. It is a description of two eras. The first wave of these websites was designed around one payment and one download, and most of them still are. What follows is the list of everything that sits outside that transaction, and where each side of the divide stands on it.
Feature by feature
Read the middle column as the older pattern, still common today.
Why so much of the field is frozen in place
None of this is mysterious. Everything in the right-hand column costs money to run and produces no additional revenue from a customer who has already paid. A verification service earns nothing. Maintaining fifty-one legal guides earns nothing. Staffing questions after the sale earns nothing.
So a business optimised purely for conversion will never build any of it, and many of these sites have been running the same funnel, largely untouched, for the better part of a decade. Their pages still describe rules as they stood several revisions ago.
The problem is that everything difficult happens after payment. The document is questioned. The building asks for something extra. A committee says no. At that moment the older model has nothing left to offer, because the part of the product that would have helped was never constructed.
We took the opposite view, on the straightforward reasoning that the value of this purchase is decided entirely by whether it works when somebody pushes back.
Six questions worth asking anybody first
Including us. A provider unwilling to answer these has told you something.
Signals that a site belongs to the older generation
What we would say if you chose somebody else
Take the questions above with you. They are not written to make us look good; they are the same six things we would want answered if we were buying rather than selling, and a provider who handles them well is a provider worth using.
What we would ask you to avoid is anything sold as a registration or an identity card presented as an entitlement. That is the one corner of this market where a buyer reliably pays for something that cannot do what it appears to promise, and the discovery usually arrives at the worst possible moment.
Everything in our Resource Center is free to read whether you ever buy anything or not, including the guides to all fifty-one jurisdictions. If it helps you get a fair answer somewhere else entirely, that is a perfectly good outcome.
Look at the evidence yourself
The platform, in numbers
Coverage, sources, and the figures behind what we claim, set out so each one can be checked.
How verification works
What sits on the document, how somebody checks it, and what remains private while they do.
Fifty-one jurisdiction guides
Free to read, no account needed. Compare any one of them with what another site offers for the same state.
The truth about registrations
Why registers and certificates carry no legal weight, and what actually does.
