How ID.me Scaled to 145M Users While Reducing Operational Risk

Editor’s note: ID.me is transforming digital identity security, proving that establishing your identity can be easy. What’s more, their platform has scaled to support 160 million members and can support up to 40,000 users per minute.To support services like tax filing that require massive scale and power real-time AI, the team migrated 50 terabytes of data from their legacy platform to Google Cloud, adopting a modern architecture on AlloyDB, Cloud SQL, and Vertex AI. This architecture resulted in faster development, more accurate fraud detection, and a 40% reduction in their data teams’ overall work completion time.

Phone, driver’s license, credit card – you probably don’t leave home without some form of ID. It proves who you are, and it works almost anywhere. But online, you’re made to prove your identity again and again, and create new logins for every new service or tool you use. At ID.me, we think people should be able to verify their identity once, securely, and bring that same credential everywhere they go online.

Our goal is to create the digital wallet for identity: a trusted sign-in that works across the public and private sectors. Today, we serve over 160 million members. As identity grows ever more essential to how we live and work, we’re scaling to make it as easy to prove who you are online as it is to flash your driver’s license in person.

But demand doesn’t wait

In the last few years, ID.me has gone from serving 50 million members to more than 160 million. We no longer track usage by the day, but instead monitor it moment-to-moment. At this stage, our platform is designed to support up to 40,000 members per minute. That kind of demand changes the equation. For ID.me members, access is everything. It’s not just about uptime; it’s about ensuring that when a member needs to prove who they are—whether for government benefits, healthcare, or exclusive offers—we verify them securely and instantly. As usage grew, we realized our infrastructure couldn’t scale the way we needed it to. We were reaching the limits of our architecture. So we made the decision to rebuild the ID.me data foundation on Google Cloud for our next phase of growth.

A new database for us and our 160 million closest friends

The first order of business was to select a database that could truly provide the massive scalability and reliability we needed. AlloyDB for PostgreSQL immediately stood out. It directly addressed the scaling bottlenecks and operational complexities we faced with our prior setup, allowing us to confidently handle our peak demands. This shift didn’t just solve our technical hurdles; it dramatically improved our developer experience. Our teams now spend far less time on provisioning, maintenance, and patching, accelerating our development cycle from weeks to just days.

Over the last two years, we migrated more than 50 terabytes of data across 15 database instances to Google Cloud – with minimal downtime. We also introduced a two-tier architecture where Cloud SQL supports our smaller and more standard services, while AlloyDB runs heavier workforces that form the backbone of the ID.me platform. That way, we can move fast without sacrificing stability. It also frees up our teams to focus on the work that actually drives innovation, like making sure AI works for, not against, our identity efforts.

Training AI to fight . . . AI?

Of course, everyone is racing to use AI. At ID.me, it’s just as important to defend against its misuse. The threat landscape is evolving, especially as generative models get better at impersonating individuals and even creating synthetic identities. And since we’re in the business of verifying that people are who they say they are, that threat lands squarely on our doorstep.

One of the great things about AlloyDB is its ability to create multiple read pools. For us, those read pools have become data clean rooms that we can quickly share out with our data engineers and data scientists. Fraud analysts can go in, find what’s wrong, and either remediate or prevent it in real time. 

Overall, AlloyDB AI has allowed us to scale our systems 10-20X of what we were able to handle – and with a decrease in price to boot. The impact of this is huge. ID.me has been recognized by the U.S. federal government for its role in preventing large-scale fraud within national systems. A crucial factor in this success was AlloyDB’s built-in high availability and easy-to-scale read pools, which enabled the Internal Revenue Service (IRS)—the U.S. national taxing authority— to seamlessly process over 120,000 transactions per second during the last peak tax season without a blip. This effectively doubled their previous self-hosted PostgreSQL performance.

We’ve been playing with a lot of new capabilities, but the ones we’re most excited about are Gemini Enterprise and AlloyDB AI natural language as they represent a fundamental shift in how we build and interact with AI. 

One login. Every system. Zero friction.

Our data teams are big fans of Google Cloud; it’s made their work substantially easier. Since migrating, they can make changes much faster, leading to a 40% reduction in their overall work completion time. And across ID.me engineering teams, the developer experience has improved dramatically. Our teams can ship full product features in days instead of weeks, spending more time solving meaningful problems for our members.

We’ve been able to scale both our infrastructure and trust. With a platform that’s faster, smarter, and built to handle portable identity at massive scale, we’re one step closer to our goal: a secure, digital way to prove who you are, wherever you need it, that works everywhere you need it. You may never get asked security questions about your childhood pet again.

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