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Integrations

Adding Your OpenAI API Key

Create an OpenAI API key and add it so AI features in your product (or your builds) run under your own account.

If your product includes AI features — a support chatbot, text generation, summarization — or you prefer builds to use your own OpenAI account, you can bring your own OpenAI API key. Usage is then billed directly by OpenAI to you at their rates, with full visibility in your OpenAI dashboard.

Creating a key

  1. Go to platform.openai.com and sign in (this is the API platform, a separate product from a ChatGPT subscription — ChatGPT Plus does not include API credit).
  2. Open the API keys section and click "Create new secret key".
  3. Give it a recognizable name such as "idea-to-life" so you can identify and revoke it later.
  4. Copy the key immediately. OpenAI shows it only once. Keys start with:
sk-...
New OpenAI accounts may need a payment method or prepaid credit before API calls succeed. If your product's AI features return errors about quota or billing, check the Billing section at platform.openai.com first — it is the most common cause.

Adding the key to Idea to Life

  1. In Idea to Life, go to Settings, then Integrations, then OpenAI.
  2. Paste the key and save.

Once saved, the key is encrypted at rest, displayed only in masked form (the first few and last few characters), and never sent to your browser. It is decrypted server-side only, at the moment it is needed: to set an environment variable on your Render service or to make API calls during a build.

Setting sensible limits

We strongly recommend configuring a monthly usage limit in your OpenAI billing settings. If a bug, a traffic spike, or abuse of a public AI feature drives up usage, a hard limit caps your exposure. This is especially important for products where anonymous visitors can trigger AI calls — consider asking for rate limiting as part of your blueprint for any public-facing AI feature.

Which models are used

The blueprint for your product specifies which OpenAI models its features call, and you can see this before approving a build. You can request a cheaper or more capable model at any time as a change request; model choice is an ordinary configuration change, not a rebuild.

Rotating or revoking

You can revoke the key at platform.openai.com at any time. Your product's AI features will fail until you add a replacement, but nothing else breaks — the site stays up, the deployment is untouched. To rotate cleanly with no downtime, create the new key first, save it in Idea to Life, let the platform update your Render environment, and then revoke the old key. See the Rotating API Keys guide for the full procedure.