The day you stop paying, every certificate you ever issued stops proving anything.

Hey.

You are probably here because you got a quote. Or because the free tier you were using closed and now there is a form asking you to talk to sales. Either way you are doing the thing everyone does at this point, which is typing "Credly alternative" into Google and hoping something reasonable comes back.

I want to tell you what I found when I did the same thing, because it changed what I ended up building.

Badgr's free issuing tier closed on 31 December 2025. Every organisation that had been quietly issuing badges for free got moved into a paid conversation inside eight months. A non-profit I know asked Parchment what that would cost and got quoted A$5,000 a year plus A$3,000 to set it up, at the charity rate. Credly will not publish a price at all. You fill in a form and wait for a call.

Then I looked at what the money actually buys, and this is the part that bothered me.

Your recipients have to make an account before they can accept the thing you gave them. You run a course, eighty people finish it, and a chunk of them never claim their badge because claiming it means signing up for a platform they have never heard of. You paid per badge for all eighty.

And the link on that badge, the one that proves it is real, points at the platform. Not at you. Someone shares their credential on LinkedIn and the click, the visit, and the credibility all land on a company your learner has never heard of. You did the training. They get the traffic.

That is the real product these companies sell. Not badges. Badges are a JSON file and a picture. What they sell is the ongoing fear of what happens to your history if you leave, and that fear is what makes the renewal conversation go their way every single year.

So I built the version where none of that is true

My name is Jeremy Levartovsky, I built Sigilet in Australia, it's a small bootstrapped startup trading as Sigilet Labs.

Sigilet is a WordPress plugin that turns the website you already run into your own badge issuer. Your badges live in your database. The verification page that an employer clicks sits on your domain, under your name. There is no platform in the middle, because your site is the platform.

It is free. Not a trial, not a starter tier with a ceiling you hit in March. Free, with no expiry, no quota, and no upgrade wall. Issue as many badges as you like, forever, and never send me a dollar.

I will tell you further down exactly how I make money, because you are already wondering and I would rather answer it than have you guess.

What changes for you, in the order it will actually matter

• Nobody can hold your certificate history hostage, because nobody else is holding it. Every badge and every award sits in your own WordPress database, on your own hosting. There is no account that can be suspended and no contract that can lapse out from under ten years of work.
• Your recipients accept a badge by clicking a link, and that is the whole process. No account, no password, no confirmation email from a company they do not know. More of the badges you issue actually get claimed, because nothing stands between the person and the thing you gave them.
• When someone shares their credential, the click comes to you. The verification page is on your domain, carries your name and links to your site. Every proud graduate becomes a person recommending you to the colleagues most like them.
• Your budget stops scaling with your success. No per-badge fee, no per-award fee, no per-recipient fee, no annual band you quietly cross in October. Award eighty people or eight thousand and the number at the bottom does not move.
• You can answer the awkward question in an audit. "Where is this data and who can see it?" On our server, in our country, under our control. That answer takes one sentence instead of a subprocessor list.
• You can leave me whenever you want and nothing breaks. There is no licence check anywhere in the path between a visitor and a verification page. If I stopped work tomorrow, every badge you have issued would carry on exactly as it does today.

How it compares, including the row we lose

This table is about Sigilet Cloud, the hosted service, because that is the like-for-like comparison against two hosted platforms. The free plugin beats all three on price and matches them on the rows that matter most, since it runs entirely on your own site.

That last row is a tie and we are going to say so. Parchment hosts in Australia too. In-country hosting is a real difference against the American platforms, not against every competitor, and a comparison table that never loses a row is an advertisement rather than a comparison. Checked on 20 August 2026.

And read that per-award fee properly, because the first hundred awards a year are free and we are not going to hide that. Award eighty people and the per-award fee is nothing. That is the point. The money was never in the awards. It is the annual fee and the charge for every new badge design, both of which you pay before a single person finishes anything. Run four courses and you have bought four badge designs. Run one course badly attended and you have still paid for the year.

One claim we deliberately do not make: that we are the only ones doing Open Badges 3.0. Credly announced support in October 2024 and others issue it now. The version number was never the point. The point is the consequence, which is the fourth row.

So how do I make money

Straight answer. The free plugin issues badges one at a time and that covers most people forever. If you are awarding a whole cohort from a spreadsheet, there is a paid add-on that does bulk import and a paced email queue, at A$149 a year. That is the entire business today.

I would rather ten thousand people run the free version and two hundred of them eventually need bulk award, than put a meter on the thing itself. A per-badge fee punishes you for issuing more badges, which is the exact behaviour I want from you.

Want the hosted version instead? Sigilet Cloud runs it for you, signs credentials as Open Badges 3.0, and hosts in Australia, from A$139 a month. It is not open yet and I am not going to pretend it is. Put your email on the list and I will write to you the day it opens, and never for any other reason.

Sources

1. Credly, How to accept and manage your digital badge.
2. Credly pricing page. No figures published; a demo request is the only route. We have deliberately not repeated the dollar figures that circulate second hand, because we cannot verify them.
3. Parchment, Digital Badges. Quote form, no price list.
4. University of Wisconsin–Madison, Digital Badges (kb.wisc.edu/135364, last updated 3 May 2024, figures re-checked 7 September 2026). This is the institution's own published rate card for its Parchment-based badging service. It does not state how much of it is the vendor's charge and how much is the university's, so read it as what one large issuer publishes that badging costs, not as a Parchment price list.
5. Badgr's free issuing tier closed on 31 December 2025. Parchment badge issuing now requires a paid subscription.