Dregs vs ShieldLabs

ShieldLabs and Dregs both go after multi-accounting, account sharing, free trial abuse, and account takeover on SaaS and other web apps. ShieldLabs is built around the identification: you check a visit, and it returns a risk score from 0 to 100, the signals behind that score, and High-Risk Events that link users, devices, and IPs. Dregs scores each identity continuously as activity arrives, and bills per active identity, with a monthly checks allowance for score lookups. Both publish their pricing. Here's where each one fits.

At a glance

What ShieldLabs does well

ShieldLabs publishes its prices, and you can start with 5,000 identifications and no credit card. Registration is open at app.shieldlabs.ai. The integration is one JavaScript snippet. A check returns a persistent visitor ID, the risk signals behind the visit, and a risk score from 0 to 100, and the same result is available over the API and webhooks. Identification, risk signals, scoring, High-Risk Events, the API, and webhooks are on every plan, including Free. The 99.9% uptime SLA is the Scale plan only.

The score sits in three bands: Trusted from 0 to 29, Suspicious from 30 to 59, and Dangerous from 60 to 100. High-Risk Events flag multi-accounting, account sharing, account takeover, and impossible travel, linking the users, devices, and IPs involved and attaching a confidence level. You can tune the detection rules for multi-accounting and account sharing. Your application chooses whether to allow, challenge, or block, and ShieldLabs never blocks anyone automatically. That's a practical fit when the decision has to land on the visit in front of you, at signup, at login, or at checkout.

ShieldLabs also rolls visits up into a traffic-quality score and flags ad and traffic fraud, next to promo and bonus abuse and free trial abuse.

Visit data is kept for up to 12 months on every plan, Free included, and then purged. Dregs keeps 90 days of event history on Starter, 180 on Growth, and 365 on Advanced, so the longer window on the plan you start with is ShieldLabs's. Trial cycling and repeat signups often take longer than a month to show themselves, and here that history doesn't wait on a higher tier.

ShieldLabs's own comparison says there is no native mobile SDK yet. Dregs doesn't ship a native iOS or Android SDK either. Dregs's tracker runs in the browser, and a native app sends events from your backend.

Where Dregs takes a different approach

Identifications and continuous scoring

ShieldLabs's pricing FAQ answers "Do you charge per user or per MAU?" with no. The bill is per identification, meaning per check, not per monthly active user. One visitor check from the snippet is one identification. A History API lookup costs one identification per record returned, on the same budget. Webhooks, dashboard views, exports, and setup calls don't count. The check can draw on the visitor's earlier history, so it isn't a blind look at one page view, but a later check of the same account is another identification. The commercial unit is the check.

Dregs bills per active identity. An account with at least one tracked event in the billing month counts once, and Dregs keeps scoring the account after the visit, on Humanity, Authenticity, Uniqueness, and Behavior, as further events arrive. Each plan includes a monthly checks allowance for score lookups on identities you already track: 500,000 on Starter, 2,500,000 on Growth, and 5,000,000 on Advanced. A check reads scores Dregs has already computed. Authenticity Check API calls are separate and count against the monthly operations quota. Badges, escalations, and webhooks follow moments after new activity changes the picture. An identification is one visit. An identity is the account, counted once for the month however many events it sends. The two units don't convert into each other. There's more on this distinction on the pricing page.

Scores you can open

ShieldLabs returns one risk score from 0 to 100 for the visit you checked, with the signals behind it, and a confidence level on each High-Risk Event. The response answers that check. In Dregs, every score is a standing reading of the account, composed of observations that each carry a value, a confidence, and a plain-English explanation, so you can open a score and see exactly why it moved. False positives are part of fraud detection. Seeing the observation behind a flag is how you keep them from costing you a real customer, and how a team ends up doing less manual review.

Training, badges, and the action in your application

ShieldLabs leaves the action to your application, which is what you want when a vendor shouldn't block users on its own. Dregs raises badges and escalations and calls webhooks, so your application decides whether to step up, limit, or leave the account alone. Custom rules and lists are part of that: badge rules and escalation rules on every plan, and on Advanced your own analyzers and datasets inside the scoring pipeline.

ShieldLabs's comparison says there is no feedback loop for confirmed outcomes yet. Dregs lets you train the scoring on accounts you already trust. You can mark team members and known-good users as disregarded so their shared devices don't drag down real users' Uniqueness scores, which keeps false positives down.

ShieldLabs pricing vs Dregs pricing

ShieldLabs pricing facts checked October 5, 2026 against https://shieldlabs.ai/pricing. Dregs pricing is current at dregs.com/pricing. If you spot something out of date, email dregs@dregs.com and we'll correct it.

The free allowance is 5,000 identifications, once. It doesn't renew. Further checks return HTTP 402 until you move to a paid plan. Starter is $99 a month, or $79 a month billed yearly, for 25,000 identifications. Growth is $399 a month, or $319 a month billed yearly, for 150,000. Scale is $999 a month, or $799 a month billed yearly, for 500,000, with a 99.9% uptime SLA. Yearly billing saves 20%. Overage on paid plans is on by default, billed at the plan's per-identification rate on the renewal invoice: $0.00396, $0.00266, and $0.00199 on monthly billing, and $0.00317, $0.00213, and $0.00159 on yearly billing. Turn overage off and further checks return 402 instead. Identifications already used that period are still billed. ShieldLabs also caps any single source at 20 requests a minute and then blocks it for an hour, and those blocked requests aren't counted.

If you only need a score on the visits you choose to check, a per-identification plan can be the smaller bill. If every active account should keep a score as it's used, billing per active identity fits that work better. Dregs starts at $17/month for 100 active identities, then $177 for 5,000 and $377 for 10,000, and each plan includes a monthly checks allowance. There is a 14-day trial and no credit card.

The bottom line

ShieldLabs is a strong choice when you want a published per-check price, a 0-100 score with signals on the visit in front of you, and a year of visit history on every plan, including the free allowance. Dregs is the stronger choice when you want continuous, explained scores on the accounts themselves, with badges, escalations, and training on accounts you already trust, on a self-serve plan from $17/month. That's the shape of fake signups, free trial abuse, promo abuse, and duplicate accounts. Comparing another product that meters a check per action? See Dregs vs Rupt and Dregs vs Trueguard.

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