Account setup
Sign up in the developer portal. After signing up you are offered the option to create a new organization — take it. Resources like API keys and configuration live inside it.
Open the API Keys tab and create a key. Give it a descriptive name — checkout-service-staging rather than key 2 — so you know what breaks when you revoke it later.
The key is shown once. Copy it straight into a password manager or secret store. Runway never returns the key in plaintext again; lose it and you disable it and mint a new one.
Generations are paid in credits, at $0.01 per credit. Open the Billing tab and make your first purchase — the minimum is $10 (1,000 credits). Sales tax may apply depending on your location.
Until the organization has credits, generation requests will not run.
With an organization, a key and a balance, you are ready to call the API. Continue to making API calls.
Using your key#
Requests authenticate with your key in the request headers. Both SDKs pick it up automatically from the RUNWAYML_API_SECRET environment variable, so you rarely pass it explicitly.
For local testing:
export RUNWAYML_API_SECRET="key_123456789012345678901234567890"import RunwayML from '@runwayml/sdk';
// Reads RUNWAYML_API_SECRET from the environment
const client = new RunwayML();In production, never hard-code the key. Load it from a secret manager or a securely-set environment variable — see securing your integration for the specifics and a git grep check that catches keys already committed.
Key access is org-scoped, not user-scoped#
Removing someone from your organization does not revoke their API key access. Keys belong to the organization, not to the person who created them.
To fully cut off access when someone leaves, disable their keys separately from the API Keys tab. Treat this as part of your offboarding checklist.
Related#
- Making API calls — your first generation, with code
- Go-live checklist — key hygiene, monitoring and failure handling
- Autobilling — keep the balance topped up automatically
- Usage tiers — how purchases raise your concurrency and daily limits
Organization, key and a $10 credit purchase — then the quickstart runs.