5-minute quickstart

Send your first request through Seldon.

Point an existing OpenAI-compatible SDK at Seldon, make one request, then confirm the request appears in Calls & usage and starts warming up Live Audit.

Before your first request

Understand Seldon's current data handling.

Routing and retention

Seldon routes requests to configured model providers. Seldon retains audit, usage, and trace data for billing, audit, reliability, debugging, security, and product operation.

No resale or model training

Seldon does not resell prompts, outputs, traces, cached responses, or API traffic, and does not use them to train generalized AI models.

Stored payloads and cache

Current behavior may store redacted request and response trace payloads and exact response-cache entries. BYOK provider keys are used for the request and are not stored by Seldon.

Policy-aware routing

Privacy-forward controls such as provider.zdr, provider.data_collection = "deny", and cache.no_store can be used, but can fail with no_policy_compliant_provider when provider policy metadata is unknown.

The path

01

Sign up and copy your key

Create a workspace, open the dashboard, and save the API key shown on first visit. The key is only revealed once.

02

Set two environment variables

Use the public router URL and the Seldon key. Your application code keeps using the same OpenAI-compatible client shape.

03

Send the first request

Run one of the snippets below. A successful response includes choices, usage, and computed Seldon cost metadata.

04

Verify Calls & usage and Live Audit

Calls & usage should show the request row. Live Audit should move into collecting, analyzing, or ready once routed traffic is present.

Set environment variables

Use the public router URL shown below. Python and TypeScript snippets embed the full OpenAI-compatible path; curl targets https://api.seldon-ai.com/v1 directly. Keep the key in your environment, not in source code. No raw key is available on this page — create or reveal one from API keys first.

export SELDON_BASE_URL="https://api.seldon-ai.com"
export SELDON_API_KEY="sk-seldon-..."

Run a snippet

Snippets use model openai/gpt-5.4-nano — a currently routable model for this environment. Replace the placeholder key with your workspace key before sending traffic.

curl https://api.seldon-ai.com/v1/chat/completions \
  -H 'Authorization: Bearer sk-seldon-...' \
  -H 'Content-Type: application/json' \
  -d '{
  "model": "openai/gpt-5.4-nano",
  "messages": [
    {
      "role": "user",
      "content": "Say hello from Seldon"
    }
  ]
}'

What success looks like

Calls & usage

`/dashboard/activity` should show the request model, app marker, token counts, latency, and computed cost.

Live Audit

`/dashboard/audit` should show traces being collected. Repeated traffic is what unlocks detected workflows and possible replacements to evaluate.

Troubleshooting

401
The key is missing, revoked, or copied with extra characters.
402
The workspace has no starter credit or has crossed a spend limit.
Unsupported feature
The requested model cannot honor the requested tool, vision, or schema feature.
No Activity row
Check the base URL, key, and whether the request reached Seldon rather than the provider directly.
Audit cold start
One request proves routing. Repeated traffic is needed before Seldon can detect workflow patterns.