Create an API key

NexoAI API credentials are named virtual keys. A key draws from your prepaid wallet and can have its own traffic and spending limits, which makes it useful for separating a laptop, CI job, application, or team project.

Une clé par workload

1. Open the NexoAI dashboard.
2. Go to Keys and choose Create key.
3. Enter a name that identifies the owner and purpose, such as samira-local-codex or checkout-staging.
4. Optionally set requests-per-minute (RPM), tokens-per-minute (TPM), and total budget caps.
5. Create the key and copy its sk-… value into your password manager or secret store.

There is no token-group step. The key itself is the manageable unit in NexoAI.

Pick useful caps

Control	What it limits	Good starting principle
RPM	Requests accepted in one minute	Match the workload's expected concurrency, with modest burst room.
TPM	Input and output tokens processed in one minute	Size for the longest expected context and parallel requests.
Budget	Total USD spend allowed through the key	Set the maximum loss you can tolerate if the key is misused.

Key caps do not add funds and do not reserve part of the wallet. Multiple keys can spend from the same wallet, while each remains constrained by its own configured limits.

Hard means hard

When a key reaches its budget cap, requests through that key stop. Raising the cap is an explicit dashboard action; it is not an automatic overage.

Store it safely

For local development, keep the key in an environment variable or an ignored .env file. For deployed workloads, use the platform's secret manager. The examples use sk-your-key deliberately—replace it at runtime, not in committed source.

.env
.env.*
!.env.example

If a key appears in a commit, terminal recording, or shared log, revoke it in the dashboard and create a replacement. Editing the leaked text out of the latest commit is not enough because older history may retain it.

Next: check your CLI environment →