Two products, two accounts

Almost every billing and authentication question in SynapseX comes down to one fact: SynapseX is two products with two separate accounts, two separate wallets and two incompatible key formats. This page is the single place where both are described side by side. Every other page in this documentation belongs to one product and says so at the top.

Read this once and the rest of the docs stop being ambiguous.

Which product am I in?

Are accounts, credits and keys shared between the two products?

No. They are completely separate systems.

• A SynapseX Chat subscription grants you nothing on the API platform. Even on the Business plan, an API-platform workspace still needs its own prepaid credits before a single API call will succeed.
• API-platform credits grant you nothing in SynapseX Chat. They do not raise a chat plan’s monthly message or token allowance.
• The two credit balances use different units and no balance ever moves between the products. Never convert a number from one product’s pages into the other’s — 100 credits means US$1 in Chat and US$100 on the API platform.
• Signing up on one site does not create an account on the other. If you want both, you sign up twice.

Which API key do I need?

The two key formats are not interchangeable, and pasting one into the other product simply fails authentication.

• sxc_… — minted in SynapseX Chat under Settings → API Keys. Scope compute. Use it for SynapseX Desktop and the SynapseX CLI. See Personal API keys for Desktop and CLI.
• sk-synapsex-… — created in the API-platform console under /dashboard/api-keys. Scope chat:write. Use it for the Platform API. See Manage workspace API keys.

Full background on both formats and what a scope actually enforces: API keys and scopes.

How is a model id written on each surface?

The same model has three spellings. They are not interchangeable, and this is a common cause of a rejected request.

The catalogs differ too, not just the spelling. The CLI carries its own catalog — run synapsex-code models to see exactly which ids your installed CLI accepts.

Verify either catalog yourself. The Chat catalog is public, no key required:

curl -s https://chat.synapsex.ai/api/models

The Platform API catalog needs your key:

curl -sS https://platform.synapsex.ai/api/v1/models \
  -H "Authorization: Bearer sk-synapsex-YOUR-API-KEY"

Read the API catalog at runtime rather than hard-coding ids — but treat it as a catalog, not a permission list: an id can be listed there and still be refused with a 403 that names the ids you may use. See Listing models.

Where do I see what I am spending?

• SynapseX Apps — open Settings in Chat. The Billing tab shows your current plan and your month-to-date messages and tokens against the plan quota. The Usage tab shows token consumption and estimated cost, broken down by model and by day.
• SynapseX Platform API — /dashboard/usage shows total cost, tokens and requests over a window you choose, with a per-model breakdown and the most recent requests. /dashboard/credits shows your wallet balance, your monthly spend limit and the credit packs.

Check that the chat plan catalog is live

The chat plan catalog is served from a public endpoint, so you can confirm the current plans, limits and prices yourself without an account:

curl -s https://chat.synapsex.ai/api/billing/plans

You get back a JSON object with a plans array. Each entry carries:

• id — the plan identifier (free, go, plus, pro, business).
• name, description and, on some plans, a badge.
• limits — messagesPerMonth, tokensPerMonth, customAgents, knowledgeBases, fileStorageGB and teamMembers. A value of -1 means unlimited.
• prices.monthly and prices.yearly, each with a USD and an EUR block containing amount and amountCents.

The response also contains Stripe price identifiers. Ignore them — they are implementation detail, they change, and they are of no use to you.

To read just the plan ids and monthly USD amounts:

curl -s https://chat.synapsex.ai/api/billing/plans \
  | python3 -c 'import json,sys; d=json.load(sys.stdin); [print(p["id"], p["prices"]["monthly"]["USD"]["amount"]) for p in d["plans"]]'

Where to go next

If you are using the apps:

If you are building on the API: