The two API keys you need (and the ones you don't)
- key setup flow decided 2026-07-23; costs from live builds — avg $4.80/site
What you're doing and why
RankRentAI's AI builds your sites on YOUR computer, using AI services that charge by use. You bring two keys so you control that spend directly (it's small — our average full site build costs about $5 in AI usage). Everything else — the SEO research data, rank tracking, and the local business data used to find you a renter — is included in your subscription. You never sign up for those services.
The exact steps
- OpenRouter key (images + logos + checks)
- Go to openrouter.ai → sign up → Keys → Create key.
- Add ~$10 credit to start. Copy the key (starts
sk-or-).
- Moonshot key (Kimi — the writing model)
- Go to platform.moonshot.ai → sign up → API keys → create.
- Add a small credit. Copy the key (starts
sk-).
- Paste both into your RankRentAI dashboard → Settings → API keys. (Stored for your account; the CLI fetches them in the next step.)
- In Claude Code, run the setup the course gives you — it pulls your keys down and checks each one actually works before you build anything. Green ticks = you're ready.
What it looked like for us
- A complete site build (all copy written by Kimi K3, every photo + a designer logo generated, quality-checked page by page) averaged $4.80 of AI usage.
- Ongoing per-site AI cost is near zero — the spend is at build time.
Gotchas
- Keys are like passwords: paste them ONLY into the dashboard settings page, never into chat, never into a website contact form, never in a screenshot.
- If a key check fails, it's almost always missing credit on that provider — top up $5 and re-run the doctor check.
- You do NOT need accounts for the SEO data (DataForSEO) — that's ours, included. If a tutorial elsewhere tells you to buy SEO tools, ignore it.