API keys
Autonoma contains no API keys. Not hidden ones, not shared ones, not a trial pool. Every provider it reaches is reached with a key you supply, billed to your own account at the provider’s own rates, with nothing added on top.
That is also why a fresh install cannot do very much until you spend ten minutes here.
Adding a key
Open Settings → API keys. Providers are grouped by category — AI, social, shops, payments, media, email, market data, blockchain, exchanges, developer tools and captcha solving — and each shows whether it is configured.
Find the provider, paste the key, save. Most need one value; some need several, and the form asks for exactly the ones that provider requires.
Each provider has a Where to get a key link that goes to the right page in that provider’s console, so you are not hunting through their documentation.
What you actually need
Nothing needs all 93. A realistic minimum:
- One AI provider, if you want generation. Groq, Google AI and Hugging Face all have free tiers that are enough to start. Ollama runs models on your own machine for nothing at all.
- One social account, if you want to publish — though that is set up separately under Social Studio, because one person may run several accounts on the same platform.
- Market or chain data only if you use those screens. CoinGecko, Etherscan, Alpha Vantage and most of the others have free tiers.
Providers with a free tier are marked in the interface.
Where keys are kept
In %USERPROFILE%\.autonoma\data\credentials\, encrypted with a key generated once on
your machine and stored beside them with restrictive permissions.
That key is random per installation. It is not derived from a password shared across copies of the app, which would mean any installation could decrypt any other’s file.
The interface only ever shows a mask — sk-a********89. The real value has no route back
out to the screen. Saving a form without editing a field leaves the stored key untouched,
so you cannot overwrite a working key with the mask you were shown.
If you already use a .env file
Keep it. Autonoma reads environment variables as a fallback, so an existing setup keeps working with no migration.
Precedence is: what you typed into the app, then the environment, then not configured. The app wins on purpose — a value you entered in the interface should take effect rather than be silently shadowed by a variable you cannot see. The settings screen marks which values are arriving from your environment rather than the store.
Keys are not permission
Storing an exchange API key does not enable trading. Storing a payment key does not enable payouts. Those are separate switches, deliberately, and they default to off. See safety and dry run.
Removing a key
Forget on any provider deletes every field for it and clears it from the running session. There is a confirmation step, because there is no undo.
Something here wrong or missing? Tell us — documentation that describes software that no longer behaves that way is worse than none.