> ## Documentation Index
> Fetch the complete documentation index at: https://docs.userkit.dev/llms.txt
> Use this file to discover all available pages before exploring further.

# Open a customer

> Creates a customer with the calling contact as its **owner**. This is how a team is born from the browser.

An anonymous visitor is refused (`identity_required`): a team owned by a row that never became a person is a foreign key waiting to break.



## OpenAPI

````yaml /api-reference/openapi.json post /v1/contact/customers
openapi: 3.1.0
info:
  title: UserKit API
  version: 1.0.0
  description: >-
    The HTTP surface of UserKit.


    Two planes share one API. The **staff plane** is what a human uses in the
    panel: users, organizations, roles, members, keys. The **customer plane** is
    what a developer's own product uses: contacts, identities, hosted or
    federated sign-in.


    Every error answers the same envelope — `{"error": {"code", "message"}}`.
    The `code` is a stable contract to branch on; the `message` is for a person
    and may change.
servers:
  - url: '{baseUrl}'
    description: The API host.
    variables:
      baseUrl:
        default: https://api.userkit.dev
        description: Base URL of the API, no trailing slash.
security:
  - sessionToken: []
tags:
  - name: Authentication
    description: >-
      Public sign-up, sign-in, two-factor and password recovery for staff
      accounts.
  - name: Session
    description: >-
      The active session: who the caller is, which organization they are in, and
      signing out.
  - name: Account
    description: The caller's own account — profile, password, sessions, avatar.
  - name: Two-factor
    description: >-
      TOTP setup, activation and recovery codes. Returns 501 when two-factor is
      unavailable on the server.
  - name: Organizations
    description: The organizations a user belongs to, and the active one.
  - name: Environments
    description: >-
      The live and test environments seeded with every organization, and their
      identity settings.
  - name: Members
    description: Memberships and invitations.
  - name: Roles
    description: Roles and the permission catalogue they draw from.
  - name: Audit log
    description: >-
      What staff did inside an organization. Append-only, and read behind its
      own permission.
  - name: API keys
    description: Secret keys (`uk_sk_…`) and publishable keys (`uk_pk_…`).
  - name: Contacts (staff session)
    description: >-
      The staff view of the customer plane, opened by a staff session. Reads
      take `?environment=` as an explicit view parameter.
  - name: Contacts (API key)
    description: >-
      The machine surface, authenticated by an API key. The environment is the
      key's environment and cannot be named by the caller.
  - name: Customer plane
    description: >-
      Called from the developer's own pages with a publishable key: boot, magic
      link, and the contact's own session.
  - name: Hosted auth
    description: >-
      Sign-up, sign-in, verification and recovery for contacts, when UserKit
      owns the account.
  - name: Customer teams
    description: >-
      A customer is a team. Its roster, its invitations and its two roles —
      owner and member — administered by the contact's own session. The active
      customer travels in `X-Customer-Id`.
  - name: Webhooks
    description: >-
      Outbound webhooks: endpoints, the published event catalogue, the delivery
      log, replay and test sends. Never gated by a plan — webhooks are a
      developer primitive.
  - name: Catalogue
    description: >-
      The plans, prices and features **you** sell to your own customers. Per
      environment, a price per currency, and `recurring` or `one_time`. Distinct
      from the plan you are on with UserKit, which is `GET
      /v1/organization/entitlements`.
  - name: Subscriptions
    description: >-
      What one of **your** customers is paying you, mirrored from the gateway
      that charges them. The gateway is the truth about money — it holds the
      schedule, runs the retries and decides what a proration is worth — so
      these routes ask it to change something and answer with what it then said.
      `provider_synced_at` is how stale the copy admits to being.
  - name: Provider webhooks
    description: >-
      Where a payment provider delivers to. Not a surface you call — it is a URL
      you paste into the provider's dashboard, which is why it sits outside
      `/v1`: a version bump must never mean editing a setting in somebody else's
      product. Signed with the secret of the connection named in the path, and
      safe to retry.
  - name: Entitlements
    description: >-
      What one of **your** customers may do, resolved: the plan their
      subscription carries, plus the overrides you promised them on top. This is
      the read your own gate calls, so it is cached and answers in one round
      trip. It is a different question from `GET /v1/organization/entitlements`,
      which is the plan **you** are on with UserKit — two catalogues, same word,
      different money.
paths:
  /v1/contact/customers:
    post:
      tags:
        - Customer teams
      summary: Open a customer
      description: >-
        Creates a customer with the calling contact as its **owner**. This is
        how a team is born from the browser.


        An anonymous visitor is refused (`identity_required`): a team owned by a
        row that never became a person is a foreign key waiting to break.
      operationId: createCustomer
      requestBody:
        required: true
        content:
          application/json:
            schema:
              type: object
              required:
                - name
              properties:
                name:
                  type: string
                  maxLength: 200
      responses:
        '201':
          description: Created.
          content:
            application/json:
              schema:
                type: object
                properties:
                  customer:
                    $ref: '#/components/schemas/CustomerMembership'
        '400':
          $ref: '#/components/responses/BadRequest'
        '401':
          $ref: '#/components/responses/Unauthorized'
        '403':
          description: >-
            `unverified_session` or `identity_required` — an anonymous visitor
            cannot own a customer.
          content:
            application/json:
              schema:
                $ref: '#/components/schemas/Error'
        '429':
          $ref: '#/components/responses/RateLimited'
      security:
        - contactToken: []
components:
  schemas:
    CustomerMembership:
      type: object
      description: A customer, as the contact who belongs to it sees it.
      properties:
        id:
          type: string
          format: uuid
        name:
          type: string
        role:
          type: string
          enum:
            - owner
            - member
        joined_at:
          type: string
          format: date-time
        created_at:
          type: string
          format: date-time
    Error:
      type: object
      description: Every error in this API answers this envelope.
      properties:
        error:
          type: object
          properties:
            code:
              type: string
              description: Stable. Branch on this.
            message:
              type: string
              description: For a person. May change.
          required:
            - code
            - message
      required:
        - error
      example:
        error:
          code: forbidden
          message: your role does not allow this action
  responses:
    BadRequest:
      description: '`invalid_request` — the body or a parameter is malformed.'
      content:
        application/json:
          schema:
            $ref: '#/components/schemas/Error'
    Unauthorized:
      description: >-
        `unauthorized` — missing, malformed or expired credential. A well-formed
        credential from the wrong family says so: "this endpoint expects a staff
        session token, not an organization API key".
      content:
        application/json:
          schema:
            $ref: '#/components/schemas/Error'
    RateLimited:
      description: >-
        `rate_limited` — too many requests. `Retry-After` carries the window in
        seconds.


        The counters are shared across instances. When that store cannot be
        reached each instance counts on its own instead: the limits get looser,
        never absent.
      headers:
        Retry-After:
          schema:
            type: integer
          description: Seconds until the window resets.
      content:
        application/json:
          schema:
            $ref: '#/components/schemas/Error'
  securitySchemes:
    sessionToken:
      type: http
      scheme: bearer
      description: >-
        A staff session token, `uk_st_…`. Minted by sign-up, sign-in or the
        two-factor exchange.
    contactToken:
      type: http
      scheme: bearer
      description: >-
        A contact session token, `uk_ct_…`. Belongs to one of the developer's
        own users, and reads only that user's data.

````