Every App, and How Old You Have to Be

The sentence the whole list is built on

The age gate is rarely on having an account. It is on being the person the money legally belongs to.

That is it. That is the thing nobody tells you.

Almost every app you will look at has two ages in its rules. One lets you in the door. One decides whose name the money lands in. Pages online quote the first number and stop. So you read 13, sign up, do the work, and hit the second number on the day you try to get paid.

Once you know to look for two ages, the whole list below reads differently.

The list

Read this next to your own app's page, not instead of it. Rules move, and nobody sends a letter when they do. The date at the top of this page is the day these were last read.

The middle column is the company's own wording, in monospace, so you can go and find it.

Every name in the first column is a link to the page that wording is on. Click one and check me. That is the point of the whole site, and a quoted rule with nowhere to go and read it is not worth much.

App or site	What they say	Can money for a job land with you?
Venmo, normal account	at least 18 years old or the age of majority	Yes, from 18.
Venmo Teen, ages 13 to 17	between 13 and 17 years old at the time of opening	No. Not for selling.
Cash App, normal account	at least 18 years and the age of majority in your State	Yes, from 18.
Cash App Sponsored, 13 to 17	The sponsor has to be a parent or guardian.	No, and it cannot become one.
Stripe	13, not 18.	An adult must own it first.
Square	at least eighteen (18) years of age	Yes, from 18.
Google Pay	eighteen (18) years of age or older, and for your personal use	No. It is a wallet.
Apple Cash	Be at least 18 years old	No. It is a wallet.
Shopify	the older of: (i) 18 years, or (ii) the age of majority	Yes, from 18.
Depop	13 to sign up.	Not in your name until 18.
Poshmark	may not use the Service if you are under the age of 13, then 13 to 17 with a parent saying yes	You and the adult share it.
Mercari	at least 18 years old, or 13 to 17 if the account is owned by and registered in the name of their legal parent or guardian	Into the adult's name.
Whatnot	18 years or older, but 13 to 17 may buy and sell with Accounts... owned and registered by a parent or legal guardian	Into the adult's name.
eBay	You must be able to form legally binding contracts	It takes that as read.
Fiverr	Under 13 is strictly prohibited. Under 18 only if the account is owned by a parent or legal guardian	Into the adult's account.
Upwork	18.	Yes, from 18.
Rover	18.	Yes, from 18.
TaskRabbit	18.	Yes, from 18.
DoorDash	At least 18 years old in most states. It is 21 in California, and 19 in thirteen other states.	At whatever age your state says.
YouTube Partner Program	No age rule of its own at all.	Only through the ad system, which is 18.
Twitch	not available to persons under the age of 13. From 13 up, only under the supervision of a parent or legal guardian	Not published. See below.
Patreon	you need to be at least 13. To run a membership, at least 18 years old or have permission from a parent or guardian	Not published. See below.
Substack	may not and must not use Substack if you are under 16 years old, plus being able to make a contract	Both have to be true.
Gumroad	at least thirteen (13) years old, plus of legal age to form a binding contract	Both have to be true.

The three that surprise people most

Venmo Teen. It is a real account and it works well. It cannot take payment for goods or services. Their words are below. So the app your friends use to split food is not the app for the job you did.

Cash App. Same shape, one step further. The account an adult sets up for you cannot turn into a business account later. You do not grow into it. It is a different account.

Stripe. This one runs the other way, and half the internet has it backwards. You will read that Stripe is 18 and up. It is not. Stripe's own number is 13. What Stripe wants is for an adult to own the account before it takes any money. The pages that say 18 are quoting nobody.

YouTube is not really about YouTube

The channel is one thing. The money is a different thing, run by a different system.

The partner program states no age rule at all. The age sits in the ad system that pays out, and that one is blunt about it: the minimum age to take part is 18 years. A parent or guardian over 18 has to hold that side of it.

So the honest answer for a 15 year old with a channel is: the channel is yours, the payout runs through an adult.

The ones where nobody publishes an answer

This is the part other pages fill in with a guess. I am not going to.

For these, I could not get a clear answer from the company itself. Some pages block automated reading. Some just do not say. Either way, the honest word is unknown, and you should go and look at the page yourself.

• Twitch, for money. The 13 figure is the account. What age you have to be to earn is not something I could get from Twitch's own agreement.
• Patreon, for money. Patreon says you need permission from a parent or guardian. It does not say whose name the payout lands in.
• TikTok, for its creator payments. There are numbers going round for this. None of them came from TikTok. I am not passing them on.
• Facebook Marketplace, for sellers. The pages could not be read.
• Instacart, for shoppers. Same problem.
• Amazon, for sellers. Amazon's terms cover buyers. The seller age is not stated there.
• Zelle, for its own age rule. The page would not load for me at all. What is clear is the real gate: both people need an eligible checking or savings account already.
• Fiverr, on taking money out. An adult has to own the account. Whether a minor can withdraw from it is not answered in Fiverr's own article.
• Poshmark, on its rules for minors. The policy page itself would not load.

Nine gaps out of a list this size is not a small number. That is the real state of it. Anyone showing you a complete table has filled some of it in from thin air.

Two things you will read that are simply wrong

"Stripe is 18 and up." No. Stripe says 13. See above.

"You can sell on Etsy at 13 with your parent's permission." Close enough to sound right, wrong in the part that matters. Permission is not the test. Ownership is. The shop is not yours with a note from a parent. It is theirs, with you doing the work.

That difference sounds like a technicality. It is not. It decides whose name is on it, who the platform talks to, and who carries it when something goes wrong.

What to do with all this

Pick your app. Go to its own site and find the two ages. Then work out which adult is going to hold the money side, and talk to them before you list anything, not after.

That adult is not a workaround. Every app on that list is built to have one. The next page explains why they all landed on the same number.