proofage — ProofAge for Python

Python client for ProofAge, the age and identity verification API. It gives you a sync and an async client for every /v1 endpoint, typed Pydantic models, typed errors and webhook verification — enough to go from pip install to a verified result in a few minutes, from a backend, a Telegram bot or an AI agent.

Install

pip install proofage
# or
uv add proofage

Quick start

Set PROOFAGE_API_KEY and PROOFAGE_SECRET_KEY (from your workspace in the ProofAge console), then:

from proofage import ProofAge

with ProofAge() as client:
    verification = client.verifications.create(
        external_id="candidate-42",
        callback_url="https://your-app.example/verified",
    )
    print(verification.url)  # send the person here

    # later, or when the webhook arrives
    print(client.verifications.get(verification.id).status)

The person opens verification.url on their phone, ProofAge runs the checks, and you learn the outcome from a webhook (below) or by calling get().

Async

AsyncProofAge has the same methods, awaited — the natural choice in aiogram bots, FastAPI and other asyncio code:

from proofage import AsyncProofAge

async with AsyncProofAge() as client:
    verification = await client.verifications.create(external_id="tg-12345")

Receiving results (webhooks)

ProofAge POSTs the outcome to your workspace's webhook URL. The framework extras verify it for you and hand your handler a typed WebhookEvent; install the one you use:

pip install "proofage[fastapi]"   # or proofage[django], proofage[flask]

FastAPI:

from fastapi import FastAPI
from proofage.integrations.fastapi import ProofAgeWebhook

app = FastAPI()


@app.post("/webhooks/proofage")
async def proofage_webhook(event: ProofAgeWebhook):
    print(event.verification_id, event.status, event.reason)

Django (CSRF-exempt and POST-only; the event is request.proofage_event):

from django.http import HttpResponse
from proofage.integrations.django import proofage_webhook


@proofage_webhook
def webhook(request):
    event = request.proofage_event
    return HttpResponse(status=200)

Flask:

from proofage.integrations.flask import proofage_webhook


@app.post("/webhooks/proofage")
@proofage_webhook
def webhook(event):
    return "", 200

A request that fails verification never reaches your handler: it is answered 401 with the reason (INVALID_SIGNATURE, TIMESTAMP_TOO_OLD, …), 400 for a signed body that is not a webhook event, or 500 when the keys are not configured. The keys come from PROOFAGE_API_KEY and PROOFAGE_SECRET_KEY; to pass them explicitly use @proofage_webhook(api_key=..., secret_key=...) or, in FastAPI, Depends(webhook_dependency(api_key=..., secret_key=...)). The Django and Flask decorators are for synchronous views, and nothing in front of them (a middleware, an earlier request.body read in Django) may have consumed the body. A missing key is also logged as a warning by the proofage logger, so it shows in your own logs and not only in ProofAge's.

Any other framework (aiohttp, Starlette, Litestar, …) calls the same check itself. Verify with the raw request body, not a re-serialised copy of its JSON:

from proofage import WebhookVerificationError, verify_webhook

try:
    event = verify_webhook(raw_body, headers)
except WebhookVerificationError as error:
    ...  # answer error.http_status

A delivery can arrive more than once: de-duplicate on event.delivery_id, which stays the same on every automatic retry.

Runnable examples live in examples/: a Telegram bot on aiogram, a FastAPI app and Django views.

Statuses

event.status and verification.status are VerificationStatus members (APPROVED, DECLINED, RESUBMISSION_REQUESTED, REVIEW, …). A status this version does not know yet arrives as a plain string instead of raising, so compare with ==:

from proofage import VerificationStatus

if event.status == VerificationStatus.APPROVED:
    ...

Unknown fields are kept too, in model.model_extra; model.model_dump(mode="json") gives a plain dict.

Errors

from proofage import PaymentRequiredError, ProofAgeError, RateLimitError, ValidationError

try:
    client.verifications.create(external_id="x" * 300)
except ValidationError as error:
    print(error.errors)  # {"external_id": ["..."]}
except PaymentRequiredError:
    print("Add a payment method to the workspace")
except RateLimitError as error:
    print("Try again in", error.retry_after, "seconds")
except ProofAgeError as error:
    print(error.status_code, error.code, error.message)

AuthenticationError (401), PaymentRequiredError (402), PermissionDeniedError (403), NotFoundError (404), ValidationError (422), RateLimitError (429), ServerError (5xx) and TransportError (no response) all extend ProofAgeError. ConfigurationError is raised when a client is built with missing or invalid settings. A response whose shape this SDK version does not recognise raises ProofAgeError naming the fields (never their values).

Configuration

The environment variables use the same names and units as the ProofAge Laravel and PHP SDKs, so one .env serves all of them (the Node SDK reads PROOFAGE_TIMEOUT in milliseconds). Constructor arguments are seconds.

timeout limits each network operation (connecting, each read, each write), not the whole request. Pass your own httpx.Client / httpx.AsyncClient as http_client for proxies or custom TLS; the SDK never closes a client you pass in.

Retries

• A GET is retried on 408, 429, 5xx, timeouts and connection failures.
• A POST is retried only on 429 and when the connection never opened. It is never retried on a 5xx or once sending began, because the server may already have created the verification.
• A 429 waits for its Retry-After, up to 60 seconds; a longer Retry-After raises RateLimitError at once (with retry_after set) instead of blocking your thread. Otherwise the wait grows by retry_delay per attempt.
• Media downloads never retry an HTTP status; run them from a queue and let its backoff wait.

Media

document = client.verifications.document(verification_id)
for item in document.media:
    if item.url is not None:  # None once purged or past retention
        client.verifications.download_media_to(verification_id, item.id, f"{item.id}.jpg")

Hosted flow first

accept_consent, upload_media and submit exist for custom capture flows. Most integrations only create a session, send the person to its url, and read the result.

For packages that wrap this SDK

A plugin or bot template built on this SDK can name itself in the X-ProofAge-Sdk header, which helps ProofAge support tell integrations apart:

ProofAge(sdk_tokens=["telegram-bot/1.2.0"])  # X-ProofAge-Sdk: telegram-bot/1.2.0 python/0.1.0

user_agent= replaces the default ProofAge-Python/<version> (Python <x.y.z>) User-Agent.

Supported versions

A Python version stays supported for 12 months after its upstream end of life, or until httpx or Pydantic stop supporting it, whichever comes first. A version leaves only in a minor release, announced one release ahead in the changelog.

The webhook extras follow the same rule against their framework: each supports the oldest release that still runs on the Python floor. Today that is fastapi>=0.100, flask>=3.0 and django>=5.2 (the 5.2 LTS, supported by Django until April 2028; Django 4.2 is out of support).

AI agents

The package ships AGENTS.md next to its code: the full request and response contract of every method, written for coding agents. Agents that speak MCP can also use the ProofAge MCP server directly.

License

MIT