Isometric’s mission is to provide the foundation of trust required for carbon markets to scale—responsibly and fast.
You can’t build trust without transparency. So we’re open sourcing Isometric.
We’re sharing what we’ve learnt about building the world’s leading carbon registry—to deepen collective understanding and help the market scale rapidly to gigatonne levels.
I previously wrote about the Isometric Credit Principles, which govern how we issue high-quality carbon dioxide removal (CDR) credits. In this post, I’m sharing how our pricing works.
It’s extremely rare for an enterprise software company to publicly share their pricing. Pricing transparency makes it impossible to price discriminate in the future.
But we’re focused on long-term market shaping, not short-term profit maximization.
Fixing a broken market
Trust in carbon markets has been undermined by years of scandals and disappointment—largely due to misaligned incentives.
The two major conflicts of interest were:
- Carbon registries—the organisations responsible for verifying suppliers’ claims—were paid by the suppliers themselves. This meant the registries weren’t impartial.
- Carbon registries generated revenue on a per-credit-issued basis. This meant the registries made more money by issuing more credits.
Misaligned incentives led to systemic overcrediting. Charlie Munger would have predicted this.
Isometric takes a different approach.
We work exclusively for buyers and we charge a fixed fee for verification. This fee is based on the amount of CDR they order—regardless of how many credits are ultimately issued. So for any given order, we can’t make more money by issuing more credits.
So, how much does it cost?
Over 50 CDR buyers have now engaged with Isometric’s business model because it gives them better protection against overcrediting. We believe this is the best way to minimize conflicts.
We also believe that all buyers should pay the same price for verification—so today we’re publicly sharing our price schedule in full.
What our fees cover
Our pricing reflects the cost of delivering high-quality credits. We develop the world’s most scientifically rigorous protocols and are building the most transparent, tech-enabled carbon registry.
We charge one single fixed fee per order. This covers all Isometric costs, as well as third party fees like digital monitoring, reporting and verification tech providers and auditing costs from Validation and Verifications Bodies. Simplicity is just as important as transparency.
Our pricing also reflects the inherent differences in verifying different types of carbon removal. Novel or technically complex pathways have higher upfront verification costs. As those methods mature, projects scale, and new research emerges, the cost of verification falls—and we pass those savings on to buyers.
Why we’re publishing our pricing
Simple, transparent pricing will help the market scale.
We hope our approach becomes the new norm: an incentive aligned pricing model where verification costs are decoupled from the number of credits issued. And where trust is built through openness.
