Tutorial: Building a Credit-Aware Verification Pipeline

In high-volume identity verification workflows, unexpected service interruptions can disrupt the user experience. When integrating verification services, it is critical to implement proactive checks to ensure your account has sufficient resources before triggering a request. This tutorial demonstrates how to build a credit-aware gate using the Balance API to prevent unnecessary failures.

The Problem: Proactive Resource Management

When you rely on synchronous APIs for identity signals—such as checking platform registration or risk scores—a lack of available credits can lead to service errors. By implementing a pre-flight balance check, you can gracefully handle account states before attempting a verification task.

Step 1: Implementing the Balance Check

Before executing your primary verification logic (such as a Per-call or Unified Score request), your application should verify that your account balance is sufficient. Using the GET https://api.ekycpro.com/v1/balance endpoint, you can retrieve your current credit status.

Conceptual Implementation

# Conceptual logic for a credit-aware gate
def check_and_verify(identifier):
 # 1. Query current balance
 balance_data = fetch_account_balance()

 if balance_data['balance'] > MINIMUM_REQUIRED_CREDITS:
 # 2. Proceed with verification only if balance is sufficient
 return perform_verification(identifier)
 else:
 # 3. Handle insufficient funds gracefully
 log_error("Insufficient credits to proceed")
 return None

Step 2: Handling API Responses

When calling the Balance API, ensure your integration handles the documented status codes:

• 200: The request was successful, and the balance field provides your current credit count.
• 401: Check that your X-API-Key header is correctly configured.
• 502: This indicates a failure in the balance query. Implement a retry strategy or a fallback mechanism to prevent your primary pipeline from stalling.

Step 3: Integrating into Your Workflow

By placing this check at the start of your request pipeline, you create a "go/no-go" gate. This pattern is particularly useful for:

1. Unified Score API: Ensuring you have the resources to pull risk signals for a user.
2. Combo Check API: Validating your budget before applying a group of selected services to an identifier.
3. Per-call Services: Preventing 502 errors by confirming credit availability before requesting service-specific registration signals.

Conclusion

Integrating a balance check is a simple but effective way to improve the reliability of your identity verification pipeline. By treating your account balance as a prerequisite for your API calls, you can reduce failed requests and maintain a smoother integration. For more details on the available endpoints, refer to the official documentation.

This article was drafted with AI assistance and reviewed before publishing.