About · 925s.ai

About 925s.ai

We help people identify silver hallmarks and estimate what a piece is worth — from a single photograph, in under three minutes. This page explains how the system works, what data it draws on, what it will and will not tell you, and who is behind it.

What 925s.ai does

925s.ai is an AI-assisted silver appraisal service. You upload a photo of a piece of silver — a spoon, a teapot, a candlestick, or just the underside of a base carrying a hallmark. The system reads the hallmarks, identifies the maker where possible, places the piece in a period, and returns a value range built from real auction records. Every appraisal ends with a downloadable PDF report you can take to a dealer, an insurer, or an auction house.

The service is aimed at people who own antique or inherited silver and want a starting point — not a formal valuation. Formal valuations for probate, insurance settlement, or capital gains require a certified appraiser inspecting the piece in person. What 925s.ai gives you is the starting point that used to require a visit to an antiques fair or a specialist auction house.

The methodology

The pipeline runs four stages on every photograph:

1. Hallmark detection. A trained object-detection model finds the hallmark cluster in the photograph and crops it. This works even when the hallmarks are small, off-angle, or worn.
2. Hallmark identification. Two independent vision-language models read the crop and identify each mark — the lion passant, the assay office town mark, the date letter, the maker’s initials, and any purity or standard mark. When both models agree, confidence is high; when they disagree, the piece is flagged as low-confidence and the report says so explicitly.
3. Cross-reference against the hallmark database. We maintain a local database of British, French, German, American, Russian, Italian, Dutch, Scandinavian and Spanish silversmiths — assembled from public silvermakersmarks records, museum registries, and standard reference works. The identified mark cluster is looked up here to attribute the piece to a specific maker, date range, and country of origin.
4. Auction-record valuation. Once we know the maker, era, and form, we look up comparable auction results for pieces of similar description. The value range in your report is bounded by real recorded sale prices from named auction houses — not a formula and not an AI guess.

The data

Three data sources sit behind every appraisal:

• Hallmark reference database. Our internal collection of maker’s marks, assay office marks, and date-letter tables across the major hallmarking systems. Compiled from public silvermakersmarks records and standard 19th- and 20th-century reference works (Chaffers, Jackson, Wyler for British; Tardy for French; Rosenberg for German).
• Auction comparables. Recorded sale prices from named UK and US auction houses. Values are updated as new results are recorded; the reports cite ranges rather than a single figure because auction outcomes vary.
• Live silver spot price. The scrap-metal floor beneath every sterling piece is set by the current silver spot price. We fetch this from a public foreign-exchange feed at build time and rebuild the site daily so the numbers you read (and the numbers Google sees in our structured data) reflect the current market. See the 925 silver value guide for the arithmetic.

What we will and will not tell you

What the report is good for: a well-formed starting point on what your piece is, when and where it was made, who probably made it, and what similar pieces have sold for at auction. That is enough to decide whether to take a piece to a dealer, to sell it, to insure it at a reasonable figure, or to leave it in the cupboard.

What the report is not: a formal valuation. It is not a certified appraisal accepted by HMRC for probate, by a court for capital-gains purposes, or by a specialist insurer for scheduled-item coverage above their reporting threshold. For those, you need a Registered Valuer of the National Association of Jewellers (UK), an American Society of Appraisers member (US), or an equivalent professional who can inspect the piece physically.

The confidence flag. Every appraisal report labels its identification confidence as high, medium, or low. Worn hallmarks, glare, out-of-focus photographs, or unusual mark combinations all reduce confidence. We would rather tell you a mark is ambiguous than give you a wrong answer with the same visual weight as a certain one.

Who is behind it

925s.ai is an independent project built by a small team — not a large auction house, not a valuation firm. We do not buy or sell silver, we do not take commission on sales, and we do not steer valuations toward any onward transaction. The product is the report; that is the only thing you pay for and the only relationship we have with the piece you upload.

If you would like to reach us — on a specific appraisal, on a technical question, or on a partnership — the contact page reaches a human and every message is read.

How the price works

Your first appraisal is free with a free account (Google or email — no credit card). After that, appraisals are $2.50 each as a guest, or less per appraisal in a credit bundle. You are only charged when an appraisal succeeds — the payment is authorised at checkout and captured only on a successful result. Bundle credits never expire. Full pricing detail is on the pricing page.