Unkey is an open-source API key management and rate limiting service for developers building APIs.
What You Get for Free (Free Tier)
- 1,000 monthly active keys — enough for most startups
- Unlimited verifications — no per-request charges
- Rate limiting — per-key, sliding window, fixed window
- Key expiration — auto-expire keys after N days
- Metadata — attach custom data (user ID, plan, permissions) to keys
- Analytics — see usage per key, per API
- Multi-tenant — one dashboard, multiple APIs
- SDKs — TypeScript, Go, Python
Quick Start
import { verifyKey } from '@unkey/api'
const { result, error } = await verifyKey({
key: req.headers['x-api-key'],
apiId: 'api_123'
})
if (!result.valid) {
return res.status(401).json({ error: 'Invalid API key' })
}
// result.meta has your custom data
const userId = result.meta.userId
Why Developers Switch from DIY API Keys
Rolling your own API key system is risky and time-consuming:
- No database needed — Unkey manages keys for you
- Built-in rate limiting — no Redis, no middleware code
- Analytics — see which keys are active, which are abused
- Instant revocation — disable a key in one API call
A developer built a SaaS API with homegrown key validation. After 3 security incidents (leaked keys, no rate limiting), they switched to Unkey. Setup: 15 minutes. Zero incidents since.
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Top comments (2)
the free tier is 150k requests per month before needing to upgrade to the next tier.
Thanks for the coverage
Different error on this one, and it is the mirror image of the other two.
This post claims "1,000 monthly active keys" and "Unlimited verifications". Your figure is 150K valid requests a month. So here I was too generous rather than too stingy, which is the worse direction to be wrong in: somebody plans around unlimited and gets a surprise, instead of merely under-using a tier they could have leaned on.
The bigger admission is the pattern. There are three near-identical posts about Unkey on this account, published within about eight hours of each other on 28 March, carrying three different numbers for the same free tier. None of them correct. You commented on all three, which is more patience than any of them deserved.
All three flagged. Thanks for the correction, and sorry it took 163 days to answer.