Onboarding Agents to an API

About this paper

An agent can read a contract and make a request. It cannot fill in a sign-up form, click a verification link, copy a key out of a dashboard, or put a card down. When it meets an onboarding flow built for a person, it does not complain. It retries — and the provider never learns that a qualified caller arrived and left.

This paper is a provider’s guide to onboarding a caller that cannot use a browser. It maps the doors into an API and what each one earns, then walks eight practices: a front door that answers, refusals that route forward and name who can resolve them, honest scope ceilings, rate-limit and price headers that describe what is actually enforced, a safe place to start, and a contract that lists every door. It closes with the anti-patterns worth watching for and a self-assessment you can run against your own API this afternoon.

What's inside

1. Why onboarding breaks when the caller is an agent
2. Count your doors
3. Make the front door answer
4. Make every refusal route forward
5. Be honest about ceilings
6. Let the caller pace itself
7. Publish the price where the decision is made
8. Give the agent somewhere safe to start
9. Put every door in the contract
10. Anti-patterns worth watching for
11. Provider self-assessment
12. Where this is going
13. Appendix A — Standards and specifications referenced
14. Appendix B — Onboarding surfaces on APIs.io

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