Totalum App Builder API — Overview & API Key

The Totalum App Builder API lets you programmatically create and manage full-stack web apps with AI. Send a natural-language prompt and an agent generates a complete project — frontend, backend, database, hosting, auth and deployment — all managed for you.

#Who is it for

CORRECT:  User → Your Frontend → Your Backend → Totalum API
WRONG:    User → Your Frontend → Totalum API

#Get your API key

Your API key gates both the REST API and the MCP server. Keys are prefixed tlm_sk_.

1. Open the API section in your Totalum account.
2. A default key is created automatically. Reveal it, copy it, and optionally create additional named keys or restrict a key to specific projects.
3. Make sure you have credits — every API call requires a positive credit balance.

New here? The Quickstart takes you from an API key to a deployed app with one runnable script.

#What you can do

• Create and manage full-stack projects programmatically, and organise them into groups.
• Run the AI builder with natural-language prompts.
• Query, create, edit and delete database records, including many-to-many links.
• Deploy to production with a global CDN, then read the live site's production logs.
• Manage secrets, files, and versions — including the diff each version introduced.
• Add custom domains and webhooks.

Totalum handles everything — hosting, database, file storage, SSL, CDN, deployments, and secret management. The agent even reads your project's backend logs to debug autonomously. The typical flow is: create a project → run the agent with a prompt → poll for status → deploy to production.

#Built-in integrations

Just mention them in your prompt — no keys or config needed. If one needs a key you haven't provided, the agent tells you via the secretKeysNeeded field; add it as a project secret and run again.

No key required: email delivery · PDF generation · AI image generation · ChatGPT · authentication · document scanning (OCR) · speech-to-text · video analysis · web scraping · managed database · deployment & hosting (CDN) · custom domains · file storage · backend-logs access.

Requires your key (add as a project secret): Stripe (payments & subscriptions) · email from your own domain (we recommend Resend).

Anything else: mention any API or npm package in your prompt and the agent integrates it.

#Credit model

• Development credits — project creation, running the agent, deployments, server start/restart, source download, uploads, file writes, project rebuilds, version recovery, export/import, custom domains.
• Infrastructure credits — only when a project exceeds its plan's built-in usage limits (ChatGPT, image generation, video analysis, transcription, document scans, web scraping, emails, PDFs, uploads).

Most read endpoints (account, list/get projects, status, logs, all database operations, the project file tree and reading a file) are free. Fetch the current price of every fixed-cost operation from GET /credit-costs rather than hard-coding it, set monthly caps per project with the credit-limits endpoint, and monitor usage via spending analytics.

#Response envelope

Every response uses the same shape — on failure, errors holds { errorCode, errorMessage } and data is null:

{ "errors": null, "data": { } }

#Explore the endpoints

Browse the full reference by resource in the sidebar under Totalum API, or jump to a common one:

• Projects — create, list, get, update, delete, credit limits.
• Project Groups — optional folders for organising projects.
• AI Agent — run the builder, poll status, conversation.
• Deployments — deploy to production.
• Project Files — browse the tree, read and write files, rebuild.
• Database — query and mutate project data.
• GitHub — bidirectional repo sync.
• Figma — connect a Figma account so the agent can build from your designs.