> ## Content Index > Fetch the complete content index at: https://entrepreneurplus.co.uk/llms.txt > Use this file to discover other available public pages before exploring further. # How Yoti Makes Money From Age Verification and the Online Safety Act - URL: https://entrepreneurplus.co.uk/how-yoti-makes-money-from-age-verification-and-the-online-safety-act/ - Published: 2026-09-29T10:00:00.000Z - Updated: 2026-09-29T10:00:00.000Z - Description: Yoti gives its digital ID app away for free and makes its money from businesses instead. As the Online Safety Act forces age checks across the internet, we look at how that business model is playing out, in revenue, debt and market position. - Author: Editorial Desk - Tags: Founder Stories Yoti gives its digital ID away for free and charges businesses instead. Individuals never pay to prove who they are; **companies pay per check to verify** a customer's identity or age. That asymmetry is the whole engine behind how Yoti makes money. Yoti age verification has become a major part of that commercial offering the product that costs nothing is what makes the paid side valuable. Founded in 2014 by **Robin Tombs**, **Duncan Francis** and **Noel Hayden**, the London-based firm has spent over a decade building toward this moment. Britain's **Online Safety Act** turned age checks from a nice-to-have into a legal duty, and Yoti's revenue growth shows a company that bet on regulation catching up with it. --- ## Free for You, Paid for Business: What Yoti Actually Does Yoti's consumer app puts a person's ID on their phone, free of charge. Users scan a passport, driving licence or one of over 200 accepted document types, take a selfie, and store an encrypted identity only they can unlock. That free layer is the front door. Behind it sits the Yoti business model proper, identity verification, age checks, e-signing and authentication, which businesses licence to onboard and vet their own customers. Yoti's site puts it plainly: the app "**will always be free for individuals,**" while the company earns money "**by charging businesses to check the identity details of their customers.**" Yoti's model is built around user-controlled identity data and data minimisation, and the company says it does not depend on selling users' identity data for advertising. --- ## The Business Model Behind the Free App Yoti charges organisations for verification and related services. Public-sector procurement documents have previously shown a combination of setup costs, minimum charges and per-verification fees, although those published figures should not be treated as Yoti's current universal commercial pricing. A UK government Digital Marketplace document lists Yoti's public-sector rates directly: | Service | Price | | --------------------------------------------- | --------------------------------- | | DBS / Right to Work / Right to Rent check | £1.80–£2.50 per verification | | In-branch verification (Post Office-assisted) | £8.50 per verification | | Portal set-up | £150, plus £30 monthly minimum | | Integrated set-up | £2,000, plus £500 monthly minimum | These are public-sector figures rather than general commercial pricing, but the mechanics are clear: a set-up cost, a monthly minimum, a fee per check. That per-transaction structure sits underneath how Yoti makes money at scale, volume, not subscriptions, drives revenue. Clients have included Meta, OnlyFans, Sony PlayStation, Aldi, HireRight and Connells, alongside the Government of Jersey, proof the Yoti business model scales well beyond any single sector. --- ## Where the Real Money Is: Age Verification and Facial Age Estimation Age assurance is one of Yoti's most prominent commercial areas, and Yoti age verification is central to it. The company says it has completed more than **1 billion age checks** for approximately half a billion individuals over the last seven years. Businesses pay per check for exactly that, and it's the single biggest contributor to how Yoti makes money today. Yoti reached the 1 billion age-check milestone in November 2025, with those checks covering roughly half a billion individuals over the previous seven years. Yoti facial age estimation, the flagship method inside Yoti age verification, uses a selfie rather than a document. Yoti's July 2025 white paper claims a Mean Absolute Error of 1.1 years for 13–17-year-olds and 99.3% accuracy identifying under-21s, figures that are self-reported rather than independently audited. Minecraft picked Yoti for UK age checks from February 2026, a concrete sign of where demand for Yoti facial age estimation is heading. --- ## The Law That Turned Age Checks Into Big Business The Online Safety Act didn't invent Yoti's business, but it sharply accelerated it. Passed in October 2023, its Protection of Children Codes became enforceable from 25 July 2025, requiring platforms likely to be accessed by children, and any site hosting pornography, to run "**highly effective**" checks or risk fines of up to £18 million or 10% of global turnover. Ofcom has already used those powers. Ofcom fined Fenix International, the provider of OnlyFans, £1.05 million in March 2025 for failing to accurately respond to formal requests for information about the platform's age-assurance measures; adult site operator AVS Group was fined £1 million that December for checks Ofcom deemed inadequate. For an age assurance company built on supplying compliant checks, that enforcement is a direct commercial tailwind, it's now central to how Yoti makes money, because age checks stopped being optional the moment the fines started landing. --- ## Why Yoti Gives Away Its Best Product Running a free app costs real money, and Yoti spends deliberately on it. Around 33% of annual costs, roughly £9 million go toward the digital ID and credentials service, an investment its CEO expects to pay back over "**the next 10 or 20 years**" rather than quickly. Downloads back that patience. Global downloads rose from 1.62 million in 2024 to 5.55 million in 2025, pushing the cumulative total past 21.5 million, with UK downloads alone exceeding 7.3 million. The more people carry a Yoti ID, the more valuable that reusable identity becomes to every business paying to check it. The free side isn't charity, it's the infrastructure the Yoti business model depends on. --- ## The Numbers: Funding, Debt and the Road to Profit Yoti isn't profitable yet on a full-year basis, though it's close. CityAM, citing Yoti's own accounts, reported a pre-tax loss of £12.4 million for the year to March 2025, down 58% on the year before, alongside the company's first month of EBITDA profitability, reached that same March. | Year | Revenue | | ---- | ------------- | | 2023 | £11.5 million | | 2024 | £17.9 million | | 2025 | £29.0 million | That's 62% growth in the latest year, per Yoti's CEO, and it's the plainest sign of how Yoti makes money at scale today. Debt has funded much of the push: a £10 million convertible loan from Lloyds in 2023, followed by £20 million in combined HSBC and shareholder debt that December, earmarked to carry the business "**comfortably through to profitability.**" Total debt now exceeds £100 million, including £87 million in shareholder loans, with a £12.5 million HSBC facility due for refinancing by December 2026. ![EBITDA profitability](https://storage.ghost.io/c/05/a4/05a4a052-18ab-4836-8924-ec8b322c371c/content/images/2026/09/yoti-revenue-model.png) EBITDA profitability ## Yoti vs the Competition: Who Else Is in the Age Assurance Race Yoti isn't the only **age assurance company** chasing this market. GB Group, Persona, Veriff, VerifyMy, k-ID and Didit all offer overlapping tools, and scrutiny has followed the sector's growth, Persona faced public questions over its security in early 2026, around when Discord was reported testing it while Minecraft chose Yoti instead. What separates Yoti from a typical age assurance company is its UK-first grounding: government partnerships, a decade-plus track record, and language that closely mirrors Ofcom's own enforcement standard. Newer rivals compete on faster self-service sign-up and published per-check pricing, which Yoti generally doesn't offer, a trade-off between enterprise relationships and low-friction developer access. ## The Lesson for Founders Yoti's model is a clean lesson in freemium economics: a free product only earns its keep if it creates something businesses will pay to access. The app itself isn't the revenue line, it's the reason the verification services behind it have anything to check. The second lesson is timing. Yoti **invested in age assurance** years before the Online Safety Act forced the market to catch up. Founders building compliance-adjacent products can take the same view, build the infrastructure before the law demands it, so that when enforcement arrives, you're already the proven vendor, not the one racing to catch up. ## FAQs ### **1\. How does Yoti make money?** Yoti's core commercial model is to charge businesses for identity verification, age assurance and related services while keeping its core consumer app free. Its public-sector pricing demonstrates a combination of setup fees, minimum charges and per-check fees. ### 2\. Is Yoti free to use? Yes. Yoti's app is free for individuals, and the company says it "will always" be free for individuals. Its revenue comes entirely from businesses paying for verification, not from user fees. ### 3\. Does Yoti sell your data? No. Only the individual holds the key to unlock their own encrypted data, and Yoti states it cannot share or sell that data to third parties without permission. ***Also Read:*** [***Online Safety Act Age Verification Is Quietly Building a British Industry***](https://entrepreneurplus.co.uk/online-safety-act-age-verification-is-quietly-building-a-british-industry/) --- *Sources: Data drawn from Yoti's own website and CEO blog posts, Companies House filing data, a UK government Digital Marketplace pricing document, CityAM, FinTech Futures, CrowdfundInsider, Mishcon de Reya and Lewis Silkin legal updates on Ofcom enforcement, and BiometricUpdate.com. Figures reflect the most recent available data at the time of writing.* ***The EP+ Editorial Desk covers UK startups, founder stories, and venture capital. All editorial content is independently produced and human-reviewed before publication.***