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Age Estimation checks whether an end user meets a minimum age requirement using a single selfie — no document scan required in the common case. It’s suited for age-gating use cases (e.g. alcohol, gambling, adult content) where you need a fast yes/no decision without putting every user through a full identity verification. When the AI model isn’t confident enough to decide on its own, the session can automatically step up to a document check, which reads an exact date of birth from the ID.
Looking for Age Verification instead? That’s a different, simpler feature — a min/max age restriction applied during a full KYC verification, based on the scanned document’s date of birth. Age Estimation is a standalone, selfie-first product with its own session, billing, and webhook.

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How a Session Flows

1

Create

You create a token with the desired settings. The response includes token, session_url, and expires_at.
2

Capture

You send the end user to session_url; they complete the selfie on the hosted capture page.
3

Estimate

The AI produces an age estimate:
  • Confident and above threshold → SUCCESS.
  • Confident and below the minimum → UNDERAGE.
  • Not confident (within the buffer band) → step-up per escalation:
    • DOC → a document check is created; the age is read from the ID’s date of birth (see Step-Up Outcomes).
    • NONE → the session resolves as UNCERTAIN.
4

Result

When the session finishes, iDenfy sends a result notification to your webhook_url (if set), redirects the user to the matching redirect URL (if configured), and exposes the outcome through the API.

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Step-Up Outcomes

A DOC step-up ends in one of the following ways. Note that the document’s date of birth is an exact age, so it is compared directly against min_age — the buffer band applies only to the fuzzy AI estimate and is not used here.
Fraud-flagged documents are accepted. iDenfy may flag a document session for possible fraudulent activity even when the document itself was read and the face matched. Because the purpose of the step-up is to establish the age, such a session yields a normal SUCCESS / UNDERAGE result rather than UNCERTAIN. If your own risk policy needs to act on the fraud signal, contact iDenfy — surfacing it in the result notification is planned but not yet available.

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Enumerations

Status (status) Outcome (outcome) Escalation (escalation): DOC (document step-up), NONE (no step-up).

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Billing

  • The age-estimation fee is charged once per terminal result (COMPLETED or FAILED). Sessions that merely expire are not charged.
  • A DOC step-up performs a document check, which is billed as a standard document scan in addition to the age-estimation fee.
  • At creation, your balance is pre-checked for the age-estimation fee (plus a document scan when escalation = DOC); insufficient funds cause the create request to be rejected.

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Next Steps

Create a Session

Create an age estimation session via the Partner API or the Dashboard.

Retrieve Tokens

List and inspect sessions from the Dashboard.

Result Webhook

Receive the outcome as soon as a session finishes.

Related topics

Age estimation resultCreate sessionAge VerificationShopifyDocument and Identity Verification Settings