Overview

In Pay-i, an Application refers to a specific service, product, or system that makes API calls to AI providers. Applications are part of a three-tier hierarchical structure in Pay-i's organizational model:

1. Organizations - The top-level entity that contains all your Pay-i resources.
2. Groups - Collections of applications within your organization or logical divisions within your organization (e.g., "Marketing", "Engineering").
3. Applications - Individual services or systems that make AI provider requests and contain one or more Use Cases.

Pay-i assigns API keys by application. Each API key uniquely corresponds to a separate application in your Pay-i account. As noted in the Pay-i API Keys documentation, "There are no group, organization, or account-level API keys." This means that usage associated with a particular API key is automatically attributed to a specific application.

Applications in Practice

Applications typically represent:

• Individual products or services your company offers
• Different environments (development, staging, production)
• Distinct systems or microservices that use AI capabilities

For example, in our scenario of a "Summarization Service," this application makes chat completion API calls to OpenAI to summarize documents for users like Jane.

Application Management

Creating Applications

Applications in Pay-i must be explicitly created through the dashboard interface:

1. Navigate to the Organization view

2. Click the "+ Create Application" button in the top-right corner

3. In the modal dialog that appears:
   • Enter an "Application Name" that describes your service or system
   • Select an "Application Group" from the dropdown (or use the default)
   • Click "Create" to finish

When an application is created, Pay-i automatically generates API keys for it. These API keys are used to authenticate requests to Pay-i and are specific to that application.

Accessing API Keys

After creating an application:

1. Go to the application's Settings page
2. Find the API Keys section
3. Copy the keys as needed for your implementation

For detailed instructions on API key management, see the Pay-i API Keys documentation.

Viewing Application Data

In the Pay-i dashboard, you can:

• See usage metrics for each application
• Compare costs across applications
• View application-specific limits and experiences
• Analyze performance and failure data by application

Application Settings

Each application has its own settings that control:

• Logging behavior (whether prompts and completions are stored)
• Default limits
• Default billing models
• User access permissions

Best Practices

Organization

• Logical Separation: Create separate applications for distinct services or products
• Environment Segregation: Use different applications for development, staging, and production
• Team Isolation: Consider separate applications for different teams if they need independent tracking

Naming Conventions

• Use clear, consistent names for your applications
• Include environment information if applicable (e.g., "Summarization-Prod", "Summarization-Dev")
• Consider including team or department names for organizational clarity

Security

• Rotate application API keys periodically
• Limit access to application API keys on a need-to-know basis
• Use different API keys for different deployment environments

Applications and Other Pay-i Concepts

Applications work with other Pay-i concepts in the following ways:

• Limits: Can be associated with specific applications
• Experiences: Belong to specific applications
• Request Tags: Help categorize API calls within an application
• User IDs: Track end-user activity across an application

Example: Organization Structure in Pay-i

A company might organize their Pay-i resources in the following hierarchical structure:

Organization: Company XYZ

• Group: Engineering

  • ContentCreator-Prod: Production version of a content creation service
  • ContentCreator-Dev: Development environment for testing new features
  • DataAnalytics: An internal tool for data analysis using AI

• Group: Marketing

  • CustomerSupport: A separate application for customer service AI assistants
  • MarketingChatbot: An application for generating marketing content

Each application has its own API key, usage tracking, and potentially different limits. The group structure allows you to organize related applications together and view aggregated metrics across them.