Simple KYC for SaaS: Add Passport Verification in Minutes with Vibe Coding

You're building a SaaS app. At some point, you need to collect identity information from your users — maybe for compliance, maybe for onboarding, maybe because your payment provider requires it. You look into KYC solutions and find enterprise platforms that want $10,000/year, a 3-week integration timeline, and a sales call.

You don't need all that. You need to read a passport.

What "Simple KYC" Actually Means

Let's be clear: Passport OCR is not an identity verification platform. It doesn't do liveness checks, sanctions screening, or document authenticity verification.

What it does is extract structured data from passport images — name, nationality, date of birth, document number, expiry date — accurately and instantly. For many SaaS products, that's all the "KYC" they need:

• Fintech onboarding — collect identity details before manual review
• Marketplace verification — confirm seller/host identity on signup
• Subscription platforms — age verification or identity collection for compliance
• HR and payroll tools — onboard employees with passport data
• Legal and contract platforms — populate client records from a photo

If your compliance requirement is "collect and store passport details" rather than "verify identity against government databases," Passport OCR is the fastest path.

Why This Works So Well with Vibe Coding

Here's the thing about integrating Passport OCR: the entire API is one endpoint. POST /v1/ocr with an image, get back JSON. That's it.

This makes it a perfect fit for vibe coding — the workflow where you describe what you want to an AI coding assistant (Cursor, Claude Code, Windsurf, GitHub Copilot) and let it build the integration for you.

Just give your AI the docs

Point your AI assistant at the documentation:

https://passport-ocr.com/docs

That single page has everything the AI needs — endpoint, request format, response schema, error codes, and code examples. A typical prompt looks like:

"Read https://passport-ocr.com/docs and add a passport upload step to our onboarding flow. Use our existing file upload component. Store the extracted data in the users table."

That's it. Your AI reads the docs, writes the integration, and you review the diff. Most integrations take one prompt because the API surface is so small.

What makes an API vibe-coding friendly?

Not all APIs work well with AI coding assistants. Passport OCR does because:

• Single endpoint — no complex auth flows, no multi-step orchestration
• Simple input — file upload or base64, nothing else
• Predictable output — flat JSON with consistent field names
• Stateless — no sessions, webhooks, or callbacks to wire up
• Self-contained docs — one page covers everything

Compare this to integrating a full KYC platform — OAuth flows, webhook endpoints, status polling, sandbox environments, SDK installation. Your AI will struggle with that. It won't struggle with POST /v1/ocr.

Quick Integration Example

Here's what a complete SaaS integration looks like — a React component that lets users upload their passport during onboarding:

async function extractPassport(file: File) {
  const form = new FormData();
  form.append("image", file);
 
  const res = await fetch("https://passport-ocr.com/v1/ocr", {
    method: "POST",
    headers: { "Authorization": "Bearer passport_ocr_your_key" },
    body: form,
  });
 
  const { success, data, error } = await res.json();
 
  if (!success) throw new Error(error.message);
 
  return {
    firstName: data.firstName,
    lastName: data.lastName,
    dateOfBirth: data.dateOfBirth,
    nationality: data.nationality,
    documentNumber: data.documentNumber,
    expirationDate: data.expirationDate,
  };
}

That's the entire passport extraction logic. Wire it into your existing upload UI and save the result to your database.

The Cost Math

Enterprise KYC platforms charge $0.50–$2.00 per verification. Passport OCR charges $0.01 per request.

Plus: no monthly minimums, no annual contracts, no sales calls. Buy credits when you need them, starting at $10 for 1,000 requests.

The free tier gives you 10 requests per day without even creating an account — enough to build and test your entire integration before spending anything.

Zero Data Retention

One thing SaaS developers care about: Passport OCR never stores your users' passport images or extracted data. All processing happens in memory and is discarded after the response is sent.

This means:

• No GDPR concerns about a third-party storing your users' PII
• No data breach risk from the OCR provider
• You control where the extracted data lives — your database, your rules

Getting Started

1. Try it free — upload a passport image and see the JSON response instantly
2. Read the docs — passport-ocr.com/docs has everything you need (and everything your AI needs)
3. Vibe code it — paste the docs URL into your AI assistant and describe your integration
4. Go live — 10 free requests/day to test, then $0.01/request when you're ready to scale

If your SaaS needs passport data, you don't need an enterprise KYC vendor. You need one API call and a good prompt.