Also please have an example API key that actually works. There are some ways to do this depending on your use case
- Have a rotating example key in your docs that rotates once a week.
- Have the example API key return redacted data, example data, or old data instead of real data instead of failing out as an invalid key.
- Add something to the response that doesn't make it usable in production (e.g. a TTS API response can have some duck noises in the background for the example key)
- Limit the total number of requests per IP address to something that's usable for dev work but not usable in production
It reduces a LOT of friction for the user to be able to just curl something off your website instead of going through the whole registration process to get the first 200.