For under $20, you get two things at most: an SSN trace and a national criminal database search. Sometimes just one of those, depending on where you buy it. That's the whole product. It is not a background check the way most employers picture that phrase, and treating it like one is how good companies end up in bad trouble.
An SSN trace is cheap, usually $1 to $3 on its own. It confirms a Social Security number belongs to a name, and pulls up addresses tied to that number over the years. It doesn't touch criminal history at all. It's a starting point, not a result.
The other piece, a national criminal database search, usually runs $10 to $25 by itself. Stack those two together and you're already brushing up against that $20 ceiling before you've verified a single thing about someone's actual work history.
So when something markets itself as a fast, near-free background check, what's really happening is one or both of those two products, sold under a friendlier name. Nothing wrong with either one existing on its own. The problem is what people assume comes along with them.
Here's the part that trips people up every time. A "national" database sounds like it covers the whole country. It doesn't, not really. It's a compiled list, built from whatever counties, states, and agencies decided to send their records into it.
Some counties report everything. Some report almost nothing. I've seen it happen more than once. A candidate had a real conviction two counties over, and the database came back clean because that particular courthouse never reported it anywhere. The search wasn't wrong. It just never had the record to find in the first place.
The only way to actually check a specific county is to search that county's own court records directly. That costs real money, usually $10 to $40, sometimes close to $100 depending on the courthouse.
There's no way around that fee, and no cheap product includes it. Somebody, or something, has to go ask that specific court, and pay whatever it charges.
A $20 product doesn't verify anything the candidate told you. Not their last job. Not their degree. Not their dates of employment. None of it.
Employment verification runs $10 to $25 per employer contacted. Education verification runs $15 to $50 per degree. Those numbers add up fast on a real resume with three past jobs and a degree listed, which is exactly why cheap products skip that step. It's not that verification is hard to sell. It's expensive to actually deliver, so a $20 product simply doesn't include it.
That means a candidate could hand you a resume with an inflated title, a job that never existed, or a degree they never finished, and a $20 database search would never catch a word of it. Not because the search failed. Because it was never built to check that in the first place.
Here's the mistake I saw more than once in almost 30 years doing this job. A manager runs a cheap check, gets a clean result back, and genuinely believes they've done their due diligence. On paper, they ran a background check. In reality, they ran a sliver of one.
That gap matters most exactly when something goes wrong. If an employee with a hidden record hurts someone on the job, and it comes out later that a real, county-level check would have caught it, "we ran a background check" isn't much of a defense. Courts call this negligent hiring, and it's a real legal exposure, not a scare tactic.
I'm not a lawyer, and how this plays out varies by state, so don't take my word as the final answer here. Talk to one before you build a hiring process around the cheapest option you found online.
A no fuss process doesn't mean a cheap one. It means running the right checks for the job, so you're not finding out what you missed after somebody already got hurt.
I'll give credit where it's due. An SSN trace alone definately has real uses. It's a cheap way to confirm someone is who they say they are before you spend money on anything else. Some employers use it as step one, then decide what to actually check based on what it turns up.
A bare database search has its place too, for very low-risk, high-volume situations where a full check genuinely dont pay for itself. That's a narrow case though. Most hiring isn't that case.
For an actual employee, someone with access to your building, your customers, your money, or your equipment, a $20 product isn't the check. It's the first ten dollars of a real one.
| What's included | Under-$20 product | Real pre-employment check |
|---|---|---|
| SSN trace | Yes | Yes |
| National criminal database | Usually | Yes, plus county follow-up |
| County court search | No | Yes, wherever the role or the database flags require it |
| Employment verification | No | Yes, per employer |
| Education verification | No | Yes, per degree |
| Typical total cost | Under $20 | $50–$120 for a standard package |
That $50 to $120 range isn't padding. It's the actual cost of checking the things a $20 product skips. Pay less than that and you're not getting a discount. You're getting less product, whether the seller says so or not.