Get a fal.ai key

Who this is for: anyone who wants to generate images or video through SpiderGate with their own fal.ai account.

What this does: walks you through creating a fal.ai key and adding it to your SpiderGate vault, so SpiderGate's media generation can bill your fal.ai account.

Before you begin

A fal.ai account with prepaid credit. fal says it "uses a prepaid credit model" and you pay "only for successful outputs".
About 5 minutes.

Limits and terms to know first

Media in SpiderGate is bring-your-own-key: no media model runs on shared keys. Your fal.ai credit and concurrency limit apply. fal does not publish a free credit for new accounts.

Steps

Step 1 — Create the key

Open fal.ai/dashboard/keys. If you are on a team, pick the team at the top left first, because keys belong to the account that creates them. Click Create Key and choose the API scope, which covers calling any model. Copy the key now; fal says "You will not be able to see it again." It has the form key_id:key_secret.

Step 2 — Add it in SpiderGate

Open Gate → Vault (/dashboard/gate/vault) and click Add Provider. Pick fal.ai from the Media group. Paste the whole key_id:key_secret value into API Key, leave App ID empty unless you deploy your own fal app, and add a Label. Under Routing, turn Share with SpiderIQ key pool off, so the key stays with your brand. Click Add key.

Verify it worked

When you click Add key, SpiderGate sends one request to fal with the key before it stores anything: it lists one model at https://api.fal.ai/v1/models with the key.

If fal 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 fal_ai key did not pass its check: <reason>. Nothing was saved.

The reason is SpiderGate's own wording, never fal'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.

Then generate something: see Generating Media as an Agent.

Troubleshoot

The check fails with Invalid API key (401 Unauthorized). Paste both halves of the key, with the colon between them.

Media generation returns 503 no_fal_ai_key. Your brand has no fal.ai key saved. Add it as above.

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.