1 · Claim your API's entry
Find your API in the index (or submit it), hit Claim this API, and verify with an email on your domain (one click) or a DNS TXT record. The stamp flips to VERIFIED OWNER and the console unlocks.
2 · Start the storefront subscription
In the console (Owner? Manage it → White-label Storefront), start the $79/mo subscription. It includes Owner Pro. Promotion codes are entered on the Stripe checkout page.
3 · Create a Stripe restricted key
Your buyers pay you — checkout, subscriptions, and metering all run on your own Stripe account. In the Stripe dashboard: Developers → API keys → Create restricted key, and grant Write on exactly these:
| RESOURCE | ACCESS | WHY |
|---|---|---|
| Checkout Sessions | Write | buyer checkout |
| Products & Prices | Write | your metered price object |
| Billing Meters | Write | usage reporting |
| Subscriptions | Write | lapse detection |
| Customers | Write | buyer records |
Everything else stays None. Paste the rk_live_… key into the storefront panel — it's encrypted at rest with a key the website itself can't read back out; only the billing task decrypts it. We never see your balance, payouts, or customers beyond what these scopes allow.
Tip for the less technical: paste this page into Claude or ChatGPT and ask it to walk you through creating the key — or, if you use Stripe's own AI assistant/MCP, ask it to "create a restricted key with write access to checkout sessions, products, prices, billing meters, subscriptions and customers."
4 · Configure and activate
Set your title, tagline, accent color, and your retail price per 1,000 requests, plus the origin your API actually lives at (with an upstream credential if your origin requires one — same encryption). Hit Activate. Your storefront is live immediately at:
https://store.apidirectory.com/~your-slug/
5 · Custom domain (optional)
Enter your desired hostname (e.g. api.yourdomain.com) in the panel and add a CNAME from it to store.apidirectory.com. Custom-domain activation is currently a manual step on our side — we'll confirm by email when it's live, typically same-day.
How the money and the calls flow
Buyer pays on your Stripe → we mint them a key → they call gw.apidirectory.com/your-slug/… → the gateway checks the key, enforces limits, meters the request, and proxies to your origin → once a day we report usage to your Stripe meter, which bills them on your behalf. Your revenue never routes through us; your $79/mo is the only thing you pay us.
Fair-use note: ~5M gateway requests/month included; beyond that we'll talk about a few dollars per extra million — never a revenue share.
If your origin is behind Cloudflare
Bot protection can 403 gateway traffic. Add a WAF skip rule for requests carrying the header X-Forwarded-By: apidirectory-gateway.