I'm not a software engineer by trade. I had an idea for an app that needed ID verification, and quickly realized every option out there was either absurdly expensive or required sending my users' sensitive documents to a third-party black box. That didn't sit right with me. So I started building my own, using AI coding agents to help me plan the architecture and write the code. What began as a simple OCR wrapper turned into a full verification pipeline: document scanning, barcode cross-validation, liveness detection, face matching, and even AML screening. All running locally, all deterministic, no AI making the final call on whether someone passes or fails. The hardest part was making it simple. Identity verification is genuinely complex, but developers integrating it shouldn't have to care about that complexity. I wanted it to be five API calls and done. Initialize,upload front, upload back, take a live photo, check the result. That's the whole flow. I built this for developers and small SaaS teams who need identity verification but don't want to pay enterprise prices or hand their users' data to a third party. Spin up docker compose, integrate the API, and you have production-grade verification running on your own infrastructure in minutes.

Idswyft

Idswyft: Open-source identity verification you can self-host

Idswyft: Open-source identity verification you can self-host