# Introduction

> What Clonvo is and how the API fits together.

Clonvo is one OpenAI-compatible API for models from OpenAI, Anthropic, Google AI Studio, xAI, DeepSeek, Mistral, Moonshot AI (Kimi), Meta and Alibaba Cloud (Qwen), plus free models served through OpenRouter, and web, company and people tools for agents on the same key. You send the same Chat Completions request to every model and change only the `model` string.

```python
from openai import OpenAI

client = OpenAI(base_url="https://api.clonvo.com/v1", api_key="sk-cv-v1-…")

completion = client.chat.completions.create(
    model="anthropic/claude-sonnet-5-5",
    messages=[{"role": "user", "content": "Hello!"}],
)
```

## How it works

1.  You create an API key in the Clonvo dashboard. Keys belong to a project inside your organization.
2.  Your code sends an OpenAI-style request to `https://api.clonvo.com/v1/chat/completions`.
3.  Clonvo resolves the model id, picks credentials (your own provider key if you’ve added one, otherwise Clonvo’s), translates the request for the provider where needed, and returns an OpenAI-shaped response.
4.  The response includes the request’s cost in `usage.cost`, and the request appears in your dashboard’s activity.

Anthropic and Gemini models are translated from their native APIs. OpenAI, xAI, DeepSeek, Mistral, Moonshot AI (Kimi), Meta and Alibaba Cloud (Qwen) already speak the Chat Completions format.

## What you can use

-   **Chat completions** with system, user, assistant and tool messages. See [Chat completions](https://clonvo.com/docs/chat-completions.md).
-   **The Responses API**, stateless, for the OpenAI Agents SDK and other Responses clients. See [Responses API](https://clonvo.com/docs/responses.md).
-   **Streaming** over server-sent events. See [Streaming](https://clonvo.com/docs/streaming.md).
-   **Embeddings** for search and RAG, from OpenAI, Google and Mistral embedding models. See [Embeddings](https://clonvo.com/docs/embeddings.md).
-   **Tool calling**, **structured outputs** and **reasoning** controls, in OpenAI’s request format.
-   **Images, PDFs and audio** as content parts, on models that accept them.
-   **Fallback models** with a `models` array. See [Fallbacks and routing](https://clonvo.com/docs/fallbacks.md).
-   **Your own provider keys** next to Clonvo credits. See [Bring your own keys](https://clonvo.com/docs/byok.md).
-   **Tools for agents**: web search with categories, page reading, site maps and crawls, structured extraction, cited answers, research reports, a browser agent, and company and people lookups, over REST or an [MCP server](https://clonvo.com/docs/mcp.md), running on your own Firecrawl, Tavily, Exa, Parallel or TinyFish key, or on Clonvo credits when you don’t have one. See [Tools](https://clonvo.com/docs/tools.md).

Clonvo serves the Chat Completions, [Responses](https://clonvo.com/docs/responses.md) and Embeddings APIs, the tool endpoints and a few read-only endpoints ([Other endpoints](https://clonvo.com/docs/other-endpoints.md)). The OpenAI Images, Audio and Assistants APIs are not available.

## Base URLs

| Base URL | Notes |
| --- | --- |
| `https://api.clonvo.com/v1` | Recommended. |
| `https://clonvo.com/api/v1` | The same API under the main domain, for tools that expect an OpenRouter-style URL. |

## Paying for requests

Requests cost the provider’s list price for the model. New organizations start on Free, with free models only. Buying credits moves you to Pay as you go: a 5.5% fee applies to each purchase ($0.80 minimum), and you can also bring your own provider keys (free up to $25,000 of list-price usage a month, then 4% of list price). See [Plans](https://clonvo.com/docs/plans.md), [Credits and billing](https://clonvo.com/docs/credits.md) and the [pricing page](https://clonvo.com/pricing.md).

## Docs for AI agents

Give your coding agent the docs as Markdown instead of web pages:

-   Add `.md` to any docs URL, for example [https://clonvo.com/docs/quickstart.md](https://clonvo.com/docs/quickstart.md). Agents that send `Accept: text/markdown` get Markdown from the normal URL too.
-   [https://clonvo.com/llms.txt](https://clonvo.com/llms.txt) lists every page with a one-line summary, following the [llms.txt](https://llmstxt.org) convention.
-   [https://clonvo.com/llms-full.txt](https://clonvo.com/llms-full.txt) has every page in one file, to paste into a prompt or a project's context.
-   **Copy page** at the top of each page copies it as Markdown, or opens it in ChatGPT or Claude.

## Next steps

-   [Quickstart](https://clonvo.com/docs/quickstart.md): make your first request in a couple of minutes.
-   [Models and model ids](https://clonvo.com/docs/models.md): how to name a model.
-   [Model catalogue](https://clonvo.com/models.md): every model with prices and capabilities.