Hi everyone, I’m new to the OpenAI API and I want to learn how to build and use my own API key for my personal or development projects. I’ve checked the documentation but I’m still not sure where to start. Can someone please guide me step by step on how to create, secure, and test my API key? Thanks a lot for your help!
Welcome to the community.
First, you need to have a positive balance with prepaid credits (notice they expire within about 1 year after you purchase them). You can check your balance here.
Then, you can follow the quick start guide here.
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This posting has an over-reliance on the phrase “API key”. API itself is an Application Programming Interface, in this case, over the internet. The target is for those that would be programming an application powered by AI.
Paid services will require you to authenticate, to prove who you are, by transmitting a secret. That is the API key - it is equivalent to both a username and your password, but you can make many.
When you sign up and prepay, you have an “account” to log in to the platform.openai.com site for management, and an “organization” as a container for billing. Even after that, the ability to make and configure “projects”, which can have delegated rights. Projects are where you can make and delete multiple API keys.
An API key is authentication mechanism, like a password, and in this case, use will cost you money. You should keep it as secret as a password to your banking. The platform site only lets you copy a key value out once during creation.
Security is: never hard-coding that API key into computer code. That code might be accidentally or intentionally copied or backed up, committed to cloud repos, or shared with others. You would use and refer to environment variables, which are stored outside of production or in the OS itself, and the code only reads them.
Testing is making an API call to one of the OpenAI endpoints. One of the first you can try after “turning on” an account by adding funds to purchase credits (such as a $5 initial payment) is to use the models API endpoint and list the AI models you have access to.
The API might not be for you if, after reading documentation and some samples of calling code, you don’t see exactly how you would employ AI models called that way.
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Gpt5 tells me API has been used 12 times so far. It thought for 12 seconds and had to write code to gib me an answer.
I can’t be bothered to fact check it.
