at first I was a bit shocked at the price of $0.10/verification (having never implemented KYC before). But after looking it up, more traditional KYC/age verification services cost up to a couple euros per scan which is crazy to me. Never thought about the cost of such systems before.
I feel like it's hard to avoid aws downstream, even if you don't host any components of any application there. For example in my team, we are currently facing issues with Slack & the Docker registry (causing prod deployments to fail...).
This is another reminder that centralization on the internet is a net negative.