We’ve been trialling our new API Keys with our services for the last few months, and they are now available for all of our customers.

Simply sign in to your Thunderforest account, and you’ll see your API Keys on your dashboard. Add them to your Thunderforest URLs in your app or website configuration, and you’re all set. Our API Key documentation has the full details.

Background

So why are we introducing API Keys, and why now? For years we’ve tracked requests by using the HTTP Referer and User-Agent headers, along with other information such as IP addresses. This has worked well, but more recently we’ve found situations where this doesn’t work as well as we’d like. Some toolkits make it hard to set unique User-Agents headers. New privacy policies can make the Referers less reliable. For some of our newer server-to-server APIs, those headers are often missing by default, and we want to avoid jumping through hoops to get started. Some customers want to use our services on hundreds of their websites, and that becomes unwieldy - they would otherwise need to contact us every time they add a new site. API Keys are therefore a useful way for customers to identify their traffic to us, and helps cut down the paperwork for everyone.

The Future

As our business has been growing rapidly, and the manual tracking has become more cumbersome, we will be enforcing API Keys in early 2017. So it’s worth updating your apps and website configurations to use API Keys in your next release.

We’re also further developing our request tracking system to integrate it into our website. This will bring you real-time information on your quota usage, and other useful information on your requests. In addition to our map tiles service, your API Keys will get you access to our other new and upcoming services.

Getting Started

If you’re already using API Keys in your apps or on your website, then there’s nothing you need to do!

If you’ve been using Thunderforest maps and haven’t got an account with us yet, please sign up to get your API Keys today.

If you have any questions about API Keys our support team is ready to help.