Launching the ClipMixAI Developer API

Today we're opening up the engines that power ClipMixAI's web app to anyone who wants to build on top of them. The new Developer API at api.clipmixai.com/api/v1 exposes four services — video translation, memory video, faceswap & avatars, and AI music — over a single Bearer-token REST surface. Same models, same quality, same credits. No subscription. No minimum.

If you'd rather skip the writeup: /api has the marketing pitch, /api/docs has the reference, and /dashboard/api-keys is where you create your key.

Why we built this

Over the past year we've watched paying users do the same thing over and over: open the dashboard, upload 30 photos, click create, wait for the song, manually push the result into a separate edit tool. We had founders translating creator content into 10 languages, agencies producing 100 brand spots a week, indie game studios generating temp music for prototypes. Every one of them eventually asked the same question: "is there an API?"

Now there is. The four services that powered all those workflows are now callable from your code — without the dashboard in the loop, without you needing to learn each provider's quirks, and with the same per-credit pricing you already understand from the web app. If a workflow that used to take a person an hour can now run from a CRON job in the background, that's the win.

Quickstart

Generate a key from the dashboard, then:

curl -X POST https://api.clipmixai.com/api/v1/music \
  -H "Authorization: Bearer sk_live_..." \
  -H "Idempotency-Key: my-fresh-key-1" \
  -H "Content-Type: application/json" \
  -d '{
    "prompt":   "Uplifting synthwave with female vocals",
    "lyrics":   "[verse]\nRunning through neon lights...",
    "duration_seconds": 60
  }'

You get a job-id back instantly with status: "processing". Either poll GET /v1/music/{id} until the status flips to completed, or — better — attach a webhook to your key when you create it, and we'll POST the finished result to your endpoint, signed with HMAC-SHA256 so you can verify it came from us.

Three things developers asked for that we didn't ship before

1. Sandbox keys

Every API key has a mode: sk_live_ charges credits and calls real providers; sk_test_ never charges, never calls a provider, and returns a synthetic completed job with test: true in the body. Use sandbox keys in CI to verify your integration without burning credits, and switch to live keys when you actually want output.

Sandbox keys are free for everyone — including free-tier accounts. The only requirement to use a live key is one prior credit purchase, which gates the API behind the same payment signal as the web app.

2. Idempotency-Key on every POST

Network retries are the bane of every billing-sensitive API. We borrowed Stripe's solution: pass Idempotency-Key: <your-string> on any create call and the server caches the response for 24 hours. A retry with the same key + same body returns the original response — never double-charges. A retry with the same key but a different body returns 422 idempotency_key_reuse so you find the bug instead of silently producing the wrong job.

Both official SDKs surface this as a single keyword argument:

# Python
c.music.create(prompt=..., lyrics=..., idempotency_key="order-42")

// JS
await c.music.create({ prompt, lyrics, idempotencyKey: "order-42" });

3. Webhooks with a test-fire button

Configure a callback URL on your key and we'll POST job.completed / job.failed events as jobs finish. Each delivery carries an HMAC signature in X-ClipMix-Signature: sha256=<hex> — verify with one helper from either SDK. Failed deliveries are retried with exponential backoff (0s → 30s → 5m → 1h, four attempts total).

The dashboard has a Fire test button that sends a synthetic webhook.test event so you can verify your endpoint signature/parsing without waiting for a real job. The same panel shows a 100-row delivery log per key, so when something goes wrong you don't have to guess where it failed.

Three use cases we're already seeing

Bulk video translation for creators

Upload one video, get 10 dubbed versions in 10 languages, with optional voice-cloning that preserves the speaker's tone. We've had a YouTube creator translating their weekly podcast into 9 languages on autopilot — the API call is fired by their existing publish hook, the webhook drops the dubbed file into their CMS.

Per-customer brand videos

Photo-to-video memory output means an e-commerce store can take a customer's product photo and generate a short cinematic ad personalized for that listing. The family-videos endpoint exposes the four modes (Moment, Story, Album, Chronicle) we built for our consumer UI; agencies are using them as the engine inside white-label tools.

Game audio prototyping

Indie studios are calling the /v1/music endpoint from inside their internal asset pipeline. A game designer types a mood and a snippet of placeholder lyrics, and a 60-second track lands in the project's audio folder ten minutes later. They iterate on temp music in seconds instead of waiting on a sound designer for every variation.

Versioning + what we're committing to

v1 is stable. We won't introduce breaking changes inside /api/v1/ — new fields and new endpoints are additive only, and the existing surface stays as-is. Anything we have to break (rare) ships under /api/v2/ with an announced transition period. The changelog is the source of truth.

Operational status is live at /api/status — a per-service health snapshot that derives from the last 5 minutes of real traffic. It updates every 60 seconds and is the same view our oncall sees.

Pricing

Same wallet as the web app. $1 = 100 credits, with the existing volume bonuses on top-ups. A 60-second song costs 60 credits ($0.60). A 30-second talking-head avatar costs 450 credits at the balanced tier. Translating a 1-minute video premium-tier costs ~190 credits. Sandbox keys are free.

Tiered API plans (Pro / Business / Enterprise) with bulk-rate discounts and priority workers are coming. If you'd benefit from those today, drop your email at /contact?topic=api-tiers and we'll loop you in when they ship.

Try it

• /api — five-minute pitch
• /api/docs — reference (auth, idempotency, webhooks, sandbox, errors, SDKs)
• /api/status — live service health
• /api/changelog — what shipped, what's next
• /dashboard/api-keys — generate your first key

Bug reports and feature requests: GitHub Issues. Anything else: support@clipmixai.com.