User guide
Getting started
Create an account from Sign up with your email address and a password of at least 8 characters, then complete the short human check. We email you a link to confirm the address; API keys and portals unlock once it is confirmed.
When you sign up you can create an organization, which is what owns API keys, credits, portals and team members, or choose a personal account if you only want to use the tools on this site. You can create an organization later from the dashboard.
Everything you manage lives in the dashboard: Overview, API keys, Portals, Credits, Plans, Organization settings and Account.
Trying the demo
The live face check in the demo runs on our servers. Without an account you can run 3 checks a day with a short pause between them; signed-in accounts get 20 a day. The page shows how many are left and when they refill.
The Demo page has two modes. Walkthrough plays an illustration of a complete verification, with no camera needed. Test your own face runs the real face check on you.
To run it, tick the box agreeing to your face images being processed, then select Start camera check and allow camera access. Keep your face centred, then follow each prompt: turn your head left and right, tilt your chin up and down, do one expression (smile, open your mouth, or blink the number of times shown), and keep your head still while your eyes follow a dot as it jumps between three random places. The order, the number of blinks and the dot positions change every time. If a step is not caught in time you get one more try.
When the check finishes you see whether you were verified as a real person, an estimated age, the range your age most likely falls in, and your age group. Face-based ages are approximate and can be several years out, which is why checks that need an exact age use an identity document.
The Demo also includes a sample organization portal you can customize, so you can see exactly what the people you verify would see.
Verification portals
A portal is a hosted verification page you configure once and send to people. Create one in Dashboard, Portals. Choose the steps it includes: an identity document (front and back), a selfie, the live face check, and optionally an assessment.
People who would rather not have their face scanned can choose to use their ID instead when the portal uses the face-then-document method. The result tells you the face scan was declined.
Set the age check for the portal: the method (face estimate, ID document, or face estimate that falls back to an ID document when the face result is not conclusive), the minimum age, and the confidence level (standard 90% or high 97%).
Add your display name, accent colour and an introduction, an optional return address the person is sent to afterwards, and an optional webhook address. When you save, the webhook signing secret is shown once; store it on your server.
Each verification starts with a session created from your server with your API key, which returns a single-use link. The person opens it, agrees to the processing, and completes the steps. You receive pass, fail or review on your webhook, signed so it cannot be forged. The return address never carries the result, because a URL can be edited.
Embedding a portal on your website
On Growth plans and above you can embed a portal inside your own page instead of linking to it. Add the domains allowed to embed it in the portal settings, then paste the snippet shown under Embed. The verification still runs on our pages inside a secure frame, so your site cannot read the camera feed, change a step or alter a result. Results still arrive only on your signed webhook.
API keys
Create keys in Dashboard, API keys. A key is shown once, so copy it to your server straight away; we only keep a hash and cannot show it again. You can restrict a key to a list of IP addresses and give it an expiry date. Revoke a key immediately if it may have been exposed.
Send the key as a bearer token in the Authorization header. Requests that include a person's images must also send X-End-User-Consent: true, confirming that person was told how their data is processed and agreed. Never put a key in browser or mobile app code.
The Docs page lists every endpoint with parameters and example responses, and the Backend guide shows complete server examples.
Age checks
Each face check also reports how much of the scan the person spent looking at the camera, and the image quality, so you can tell an inattentive or poorly lit attempt from a suspicious one.
A face age check returns pass when the person is very likely at least the minimum age, fail when they are very likely younger, and inconclusive otherwise. Inconclusive is not a rejection; ask for an ID document instead.
An ID document check reads the date of birth from the machine-readable zone of a passport or ID card and confirms it with the check digits printed on the document, or from the barcode on the back of a driving licence. If the printed date does not match the machine-readable data, the result is sent for review.
Choose high confidence when a wrong pass would be costly. Under the UK Online Safety Act and similar rules, regulators recommend estimating against a higher challenge age and confirming with a document below it, which is what the face-then-document method does.
Photographing an ID
When a portal asks for both a face check and an ID, we also compare the face from the check with the portrait on the ID. A clear match passes, a clear mismatch fails, and anything in between is sent for review. Keep the portrait free of glare so it can be read.
Place the document on a dark, plain surface in good light, fill most of the frame and avoid glare. Photograph the side with the photo first, then the back. Passports only need the photo page, which includes the machine-readable lines at the bottom.
Screenshots, photocopies and photos of a screen are detected and sent for review.
Credits and plans
API checks use credits: one credit per analysis. Buy credit packs in Dashboard, Credits, or subscribe to a monthly plan in Dashboard, Plans for included credits, more team seats, more API keys and webhooks. Payments are handled by Stripe; we never see your card number.
Subscriptions renew monthly until cancelled from the billing portal, and continue until the end of the paid period.
Team and organization settings
Invite colleagues from Organization settings. Members have the owner, admin or member role. Owners and admins manage API keys, portals, billing and the team; members can use the organization dashboard. Only an owner can make someone else an owner.
Organization settings also control which fields API responses include, and an age-only mode that limits responses to the age result.
Account security
Turn on two-step sign-in in Account to require a code sent to your email each time you sign in. Account also lists every device signed in to your account, lets you sign them out, and lets you change your password or email address.
Requests from this website are encrypted in your browser before they are sent, in addition to HTTPS, and each one can only be used once.
Support assistant
Signed-in users can ask the support assistant, the chat button in the corner, about using Solar Identity. Messages are encrypted in your browser, are not stored, and there is a daily message limit. For anything it cannot answer, use the Contact page.
Assessments and tools
The Tests page has personality and reasoning assessments and other tools you can try. They are for interest and screening only and are not a diagnosis or professional advice.
The reasoning assessment writes new questions for each attempt and adapts them to your answers, so no two attempts are the same. It stops once the estimate is precise enough, usually after 10 to 20 questions, and shows a likely range rather than a single number. If your answers do not narrow it down, or look like guessing, it tells you that instead of showing a score.
Assessment API
Apps can run the same assessments through the API. GET /api/assess/v1/catalog lists them. POST /api/assess/v1/sessions starts one and returns the first question; send each answer to /api/assess/v1/sessions/answer to receive the next question, then call /api/assess/v1/sessions/result. Every response carries an encrypted session token that you send back with the next call, so you do not need to store anything else.
To use your own questions, give each one an id, its text and, ideally, the trait it measures. POST /api/assess/v1/score scores a full set of answers in one call, and POST /api/assess/v1/quizzes saves a quiz so people can take it question by question. Questions without a trait are compared with the traits we already measure and come back with suggestions. Each trait needs at least three answered questions, and five or more gives a much tighter estimate.
A result has one of four statuses: estimated, partial (some traits estimated), insufficient_information or unreliable. The last two come with the reasons, such as too few questions or answers that look random, so you can tell the person what to do next.
Plans include a monthly number of assessments: Free 300, Basic 3,000, Growth 25,000, Scale 100,000, Diamond 300,000, Platinum 1,000,000 and Enterprise by agreement. On Free and Basic, show the attribution returned with each result next to the result. The Terms explain the licence in full.
Your data
Face, document and audio images are processed in memory and deleted as soon as the result is produced; no face template is created. What is kept is the result. The Privacy Policy explains what is collected, why, how long it is kept and your rights. To have your data deleted, email legal@starsolenterprise.com.
Questions
What is Solar Identity?
Solar Identity is an age and identity verification service by Starlight Solutions, Inc. It checks that a real person is present with a face scan, estimates age from a face, reads passports, ID cards and driving licences, and gives businesses hosted verification pages and an API.
Can I try the face scan for free?
Yes. The Demo page runs the real face check with your own camera at no cost and shows whether you were verified as a real person, an estimated age and your age group.
How accurate is face age estimation?
Face-based estimates are approximate and can be several years out, especially for teenagers and young adults. Solar Identity reports an estimate, a likely range and an age group, and recommends confirming with an ID document when an exact age matters.
Is my face stored?
No. Images are processed in memory on Solar Identity servers and deleted as soon as the result is produced. No face template is created and only the result is kept.
Which documents can it read?
Passports and ID cards with a machine-readable zone, checked against their ICAO check digits, and US and Canadian driving licences through the barcode on the back.
How do businesses use it?
A business creates a verification portal or calls the API with a key, sends the person a single-use link, and receives a signed pass, fail or review result on a webhook. Portals can also be embedded in the business's own site on supported plans.
When was Solar Identity released?
Solar Identity was first released on 1 October 2026.
Release history
Stronger checks ()
- Longer face check with four head movements in a random order, an expression step, and an eye-following step with a dot at three random positions
- Blink detection that adapts to each person, including people with glasses or a weak blink signal, and a random number of blinks
- Demo shows an estimated age and likely age range
- ID cards and passports read from both sides, with every check digit verified, and driving licence barcodes supported
- Requests from the website are encrypted and single-use
- New human-check puzzles that fail real people far less often
- Embeddable portals and a customizable sample portal in the demo
- This guide
Initial release ()
- Liveness checks, face age estimation and identity document reading
- Hosted verification portals with signed webhooks
- API keys, credits and subscription plans
- Personality and reasoning assessments