WorkOS API Keys: Let Your Customers Build Integrations Without Building the Infrastructure

Every B2B application eventually reaches a point where customers start asking for API access. It's a sign of growth—your product has become essential enough that customers want to build integrations, automate workflows, and extend functionality. But when you sit down to implement API authentication, you realize you're about to spend weeks building infrastructure that every other SaaS company has already built.

See the live announcement and demo of WorkOS API Keys during Enterprise Ready Conf 2025 below: 

We're launching WorkOS API Keys to eliminate that undifferentiated work. Instead of implementing your own API key generation, storage, verification, and management system, you can ship a production-ready solution in an afternoon.

The Problem with DIY API Keys

When we talk to engineering teams about how they handle API authentication, we hear the same story repeatedly. What seems like a straightforward feature quickly balloons into a significant project with subtle security implications at every turn.

The Security Minefield

The most obvious footgun is storage. Storing API keys in plain text is a well-known anti-pattern, yet it's surprisingly common in homegrown implementations, especially in early versions that get rushed to production. But even teams that hash their keys properly often stumble on other security considerations: How do you ensure keys are generated with sufficient entropy? How do you handle key rotation? What's your revocation strategy?

The Management Layer Nobody Wants to Build

Beyond the security fundamentals, there's an entire management interface to consider. Your customers need a way to create new keys, view existing keys, revoke compromised ones, and understand what each key can access. Building a secure, intuitive UI for this is time-consuming work that doesn't differentiate your product. Your customers simply expect it to work the way API key management works everywhere else.

The Permission Complexity

If you want to offer fine-grained API keys—and you should—you're now dealing with permission modeling, scope definitions, and access control logic. A customer should be able to create a read-only API key or restrict a key to specific operations. Implementing this from scratch means building not just the key infrastructure, but an entire permissions system to back it.

How WorkOS API Keys Works

We've designed API Keys to integrate seamlessly with the WorkOS primitives you're already using. Since we already know about your organizations and permission structures, we can provide organization-scoped API keys that work out of the box with your existing setup.

Drop-In Widget for Customer-Facing Management

The centerpiece of the feature is a widget you can embed directly in your application. Once integrated, your organization admins can create, view, and revoke API keys without you building a single management screen. The widget handles all the security best practices: keys are only displayed in full at creation time, subsequent views show masked versions, and revocation is immediate.

APIs for Custom Workflows

If you need more control or want to build a custom interface, we're also shipping comprehensive APIs for key management. Create keys programmatically, revoke them based on your business logic, or build entirely custom workflows while still leveraging WorkOS's secure key generation and storage.

Built-In Permission Scoping

Here's where WorkOS's existing infrastructure really shines. You can designate which of your WorkOS permissions should be available for API keys. When your customers create a key, they can select from these permissions to create fine-grained access controls. Need a read-only integration key? Select only the read permissions. Building a key for a specific integration? Scope it to just those operations.

You maintain control over what's possible, your customers get the granularity they need, and you don't have to build a permissions system from scratch.

Why WorkOS is Positioned to Build This

We've spent years building authentication and authorization infrastructure. Our systems already manage your organizations, handle your permission structures, and process millions of authentication requests. API Keys is a natural extension of that foundation.

When you use WorkOS for API Keys, you're not just getting a key generation service—you're getting battle-tested infrastructure that integrates with your existing auth setup. The same organization data that powers your SSO and directory sync now powers your API authentication. The same permission system that controls user access now controls API key access.

This isn't a bolt-on solution. It's a cohesive addition to the auth infrastructure you're already using.

Looking Ahead

We're launching with organization-scoped API keys, which covers the majority of B2B use cases. But we're already thinking about what comes next. User-scoped keys that belong to individual team members rather than an entire organization. Key expiration policies. Deeper integration with our upcoming Advanced RBAC features, potentially including resource-scoped keys that can access specific objects within your application.

We'll be shipping these capabilities based on your feedback and usage patterns, so let us know what matters most to your use case.

Get Started Today

API Keys is available now for all WorkOS customers. Check out our documentation to add the widget to your application, or explore the APIs if you want to build custom workflows.

Stop spending engineering time on API authentication infrastructure. Your customers expect API access to just work—and now it can.