Get a Cohere key
Who this is for: anyone who wants to try Cohere's Command, Embed and Rerank models through SpiderGate on their own Cohere account.
What this does: walks you through copying your Cohere trial key (or a production key) and adding it to your SpiderGate vault.
Before you begin
A Cohere account. Cohere creates a trial key for you when the account is made.
About 3 minutes.
Limits and terms to know first
Cohere says calls made with a trial key are free and "limited to 1,000 API calls a month". Per minute, Cohere's rate-limits page gives Chat 20 calls and Rerank 10 calls. Its FAQ gives a different Embed figure from the rate-limits page, so check your own dashboard.
Warning: Cohere's pricing FAQ says trial keys "are not permitted to be used for production or commercial purposes". For real traffic, an account Owner must request a production key under Billing and Usage.
Warning: Cohere's terms say you must not "share, transfer or otherwise provide access to an account designated for you to another person". Keep this key to your own brand.
Cohere logs prompts and generations and deletes them after 30 days. You can opt out under Settings → Data Controls.
Steps
Step 1 — Copy your key
Sign in and open dashboard.cohere.com/api-keys. Your trial key is already there. Copy it, or create a new trial or production key on the same page.
Step 2 — Add the key in SpiderGate
Open Gate → Vault (/dashboard/gate/vault) and click Add Provider. Type Cohere in Search providers... and pick it from the Free keys group.
Fill in the dialog:
API Key — paste the Cohere key
Label — a name you will recognise later, for example the account it came from.
Under Routing, turn Share with SpiderIQ key pool off. It is on by default, and while it is on, other brands can draw on this key's free quota. Your provider's terms tie the key to your account (see the warnings above), so keep it to your brand.
Click Add key. The button reads Saving... while SpiderGate checks the key.
Verify it worked
When you click Add key, SpiderGate sends one request to Cohere with the key before it stores anything: it lists your models at https://api.cohere.com/v1/models.
If Cohere accepts the key, the dialog closes and the key appears in your vault list.
If it does not, the dialog stays open and shows:
The cohere key did not pass its check: <reason>. Nothing was saved.The reason is SpiderGate's own wording, never Cohere's error text. The usual ones are Invalid API key (401 Unauthorized), Access denied (403 Forbidden) and The account behind this key has no credit left (402).
To see the key serve a request, give it a slot in one of your own routing aliases and send a request to that alias. The trace shows which provider answered.
Troubleshoot
Requests fail with a 429. Cohere sends 429 "when the rate limit has been exceeded", which on a trial key is often the 1,000-calls-a-month cap.
The check fails with The account behind this key has no credit left (402). Cohere sends 402 "when the account has reached its billing limit".
Too many keys checked for this workspace; try again in …s. SpiderGate runs at most 20 key checks per brand in any 10 minutes. Wait the number of seconds it gives, then click Add key again.
Request timed out (15s) or Could not reach … to check the key. Try again later. The provider did not answer in time. Nothing was saved. Try again in a minute.
The provider is rate-limiting us (429). Try again in a minute. The provider throttled the check itself. Wait a minute and retry.