Automette

The Automette REST API lets you render documents from your templates, retrieve renders, manage webhooks, and generate signed on-demand URLs.

Base URL

https://automette.com

All endpoints are versioned and live under /api/v1.

Conventions

Content type — Request and response bodies are JSON. Send Content-Type: application/json on every POST, PATCH, and DELETE.
Identifiers — Resource IDs (templates, renders, jobs, webhook subscriptions, forms) are CUIDs — 25-character lowercase alphanumeric strings like cm4rnd7qh0001jx04w8e2t5va. Treat them as opaque. The one exception is event IDs in webhook payloads, which are prefixed evt_.
Timestamps — ISO 8601 UTC strings (2026-04-22T12:00:00.000Z).
self URL — List and single-resource responses include a self field with the canonical URL of the resource. Always prefer following self over reconstructing URLs by hand.

Authentication

Every request must include an Authorization header with a team-scoped API key:

Authorization: Bearer dg_your_api_key

See Authentication for full details on creating and rotating keys.

Errors

The API returns standard HTTP status codes and a JSON body shaped like:

{ "error": "Human-readable message", "detail": "Optional extra context" }

Code	When
`400`	Invalid JSON body or missing required field
`401`	Missing, malformed, or unrecognized API key
`402`	Insufficient credits for this operation
`404`	Resource does not exist or is not visible to your team (including resources owned by other teams)
`422`	Validation failed (e.g. unknown event, bad URL format)
`425`	Render not yet ready for download
`500`	Server error — safe to retry

Insufficient-credit errors (402) include extra fields so you can react programmatically:

{
  "error": "Insufficient credits",
  "required_credits": 1,
  "available_credits": 0,
  "credit_balance": 0,
  "overage_limit": 0
}

Render endpoints are gated by your monthly credit balance, not request rate. Most management endpoints (templates, webhooks) have no hard limit but should not be polled aggressively — use webhooks instead.

Idempotency

POST /api/v1/renders is not idempotent — retrying a failed POST will create a new render. To avoid duplicate work after a network error, use async mode and rely on the webhook_url field for completion notification, then dedupe on render_id in your handler.

Versioning

/api/v1 is the only supported version. Breaking changes will be released under a new path (/api/v2) with a deprecation window for v1.

API overview