Quickstart

60-second onboarding — get a key, make your first request from curl, JavaScript, and Python, and find what to read next.

60 seconds from "no account" to "first response in your terminal."

1. Get an API key

Sign up at /signup (no credit card required).
Go to /account/keys and click Create key.
Copy the key — it looks like fbapi_test_AbCdEfGhIjKlMnOpQrStUvWxYz0123456789012345678 (43-char base64url body).

The fbapi_test_… prefix is for development; fbapi_live_… is production. Both use the same X-API-Key header.

2. First request — curl

curl -H "X-API-Key: fbapi_test_..." \
  "https://api.floridabusinessapi.com/v1/entities/search?name=disney&limit=3"

Sample response:

{
  "data": [
    {
      "document_number": "L23000038085",
      "entity_name": "WALT DISNEY TRAVEL CO., LLC",
      "status": "active",
      "filing_date": "2023-01-24"
    }
  ],
  "pagination": { "limit": 3, "offset": 0, "total": 1, "has_more": false },
  "meta": { "request_id": "req_AbCdEfGhIjKlMnOpQrStUv", "dataset_status": "live" }
}

3. JavaScript (fetch)

const res = await fetch(
  "https://api.floridabusinessapi.com/v1/entities/search?name=disney&limit=3",
  { headers: { "X-API-Key": process.env.FBAPI_KEY } },
);
if (!res.ok) throw new Error(`HTTP ${res.status}`);
const body = await res.json();
console.log(body.data);

4. Python (requests)

import os
import requests

resp = requests.get(
    "https://api.floridabusinessapi.com/v1/entities/search",
    headers={"X-API-Key": os.environ["FBAPI_KEY"]},
    params={"name": "disney", "limit": 3},
    timeout=10,
)
resp.raise_for_status()
print(resp.json()["data"])

5. No-auth sample (optional)

If you want to evaluate the response shape without signing up:

curl "https://floridabusinessapi.com/api/v1/sample?name=disney&limit=3"

The sample endpoint is rate-limited to 60 req/hour/IP, returns up to 25 fixture rows, and labels the response with meta.sample = true + meta.dataset_status = "sample" so you cannot accidentally ship sample data to production.