Getting Started as a Merchant

Becoming a Lava Merchant

Setting up as a Lava merchant takes just a few minutes. Here's what you need to do.

Step 1: Create Your Account

Sign up at lava.so and create your merchant account. Lava uses Clerk for authentication, so you can sign up with your email or Google account.

Step 2: Complete Stripe Connect Onboarding

To receive payouts from customer usage, you'll need to connect your bank account through Stripe Connect. Lava walks you through this process during onboarding — it typically takes 5–10 minutes to verify your identity and banking details.

Step 3: Configure Your Product

Set up your pricing and billing configuration:

• Fee model — Choose fixed per-unit fees or percentage markup
• Pricing tiers — Optional volume discounts for high-usage customers
• Billing units — Bill by tokens, characters, API calls, or time
• Credit exhaustion — Decide what happens when a customer's balance runs out

Step 4: Generate API Keys

Create API keys (forward tokens) in your Lava dashboard. You'll distribute these to your application for authenticating requests through Lava's proxy.

Step 5: Integrate

Integration is minimal — change your AI API base URL to Lava's proxy endpoint and add your forward token as an authorization header. Your existing code stays the same.

Step 6: Set Up Checkout

Embed Lava's checkout in your application so customers can fund their wallets. You can use Lava's hosted checkout page or the React SDK for a fully embedded experience.

Step 7: Go Live

Once your integration is working, switch from test mode to live mode. Customer usage will be metered, billed, and paid out automatically.