The door moves faster when the ID reads itself

Targeting Q4 2026 on iOS. Everyone on the early access list gets it before the public listing, and gets asked what to build next.

Not decided yet, and I would rather say that than invent a number. The commitment I will make: a physical scanner runs $300 and up per door, and this will cost meaningfully less than that. Early access venues get founding pricing, locked for as long as they stay subscribed.

Yes. Serving a minor typically means a fine, a suspension, or losing the licence outright. But most US states also have an affirmative defence: if you can show you electronically verified the document at the door, the venue is shielded from administrative penalty even when the forgery was good enough to fool a person. That defence rests on having the record — which is the part a paper log, or a doorman doing date arithmetic in his head, cannot give you. Confirm the specifics with your own licensing authority; this is not legal advice.

Two ways. It takes the date maths away from a person standing in a dark, loud room at 1am, which is where most honest mistakes happen. And it leaves a timestamped record of every check and its result — the audit trail you put in front of a liquor board or an inspector to show due diligence. Requirements differ by state and country, so confirm with yours.

Fast enough. The PDF417 barcode on the back of every US and Canadian licence decodes in a fraction of a second on any recent iPhone — the camera frameworks are built for exactly this. The dedicated scanner sold for this job is a single-purpose device you buy, charge, carry and eventually replace, doing something the phone already in your pocket does.

Because a card is two things to forge, and most fakes only bother with the one you look at. The front gets copied well; the barcode behind it gets the encoding wrong. So the checks are structural — does the barcode agree with the printed front, is the field syntax right for that issuing state, is the expiry logic coherent, has the document been altered. It catches the common ones. It will not catch a well-made forgery, and any product claiming otherwise is selling you something. It is a strong first filter, not a replacement for a trained door.

A patron of age gets scanned, walks in, then passes their ID back down the queue to an underage friend. Anti-passback catches it by flagging any document scanned twice inside a set window — thirty minutes, say — so the door sees the reuse instead of waving it through. Planned for the first release.

That is the design. Age calculation, barcode parsing and your own ban list all resolve on the device with no network involved. Basements, warehouses, festival fields — a queue should never stall because the venue Wi-Fi is saturated or there is no signal in the room. Scans sync whenever the phone next finds a connection.

That is the intent: when devices have a connection they sync through a shared venue record, so someone refused at the main entrance is flagged at the VIP and back doors within seconds rather than at the end of the night. Multi-door sync is roadmapped for launch, and it is one of the first things I want early access venues to pressure-test.

Age verification for alcohol, tobacco and venue entry is permitted in most jurisdictions. What varies is what you are allowed to keep afterwards, and for how long — venues get caught out on retention, not on the scan itself. The safe posture is to read the document, derive the answer, and not hold identifying detail you have no reason to hold. Rules differ by state and country; confirm yours. This is not legal advice.

The design goal is that identity data is read on-device and never leaves it — what syncs is the fact that a scan happened and its result, not the person. Unless you deliberately add someone to your venue’s own ban list, the address and licence number on that document are not retained or uploaded anywhere. The privacy policy will state the final architecture in plain language before launch, and if that goal changes you will hear about it before you are asked to pay.

It gives you a contemporaneous, timestamped record of checks performed, which is what most authorities want to see. Requirements differ by state and country, so confirm with yours. This is not legal advice.