# Getting Started
### :closed\_lock\_with\_key: Authentication
We use a simple API key authentication scheme. After purchasing your Enterprise plan on [our website](https://virtualstagingai.app) you will have access to your personal API key under [Settings](https://virtualstagingai.app/settings).
You can authenticate all requests by including an Authorization Header with the value
`Authorization: Api-Key {your_api_key_here}`
### 💻 Best Practices for Building Applications around this API
This API does one thing well: generate images. Auxiliary infrastructure has to be built by you:
1. **Store your own images**
While we do return image urls from our endpoints, they are not suited to be directly embedded in your own applications. They are signed links which are generated each time you call the Get Render request and will expire within two weeks. That's why we recommend to download the images to your own cloud storage. Accordingly, we can't guarantee inbound-access to the images for any extended period of time after the initial generation (>1h)
2. **Store your own user profiles**\
If you're building a product around our API, you'll likely want to allow multiple users to manage their own images on your platform. As you may have noticed, we do not offer any type of multi-tenant use of our API. All images are accessible with your single API key. Therefore, you should store the API key on your own backend, use it to retrieve/generate images, save the results and generation parameters into your own database, and have your own authentication system that grants your users access to their images, but not to the images of other users.
### :post\_office: Postman Example Calls
We've created a [Postman workspace](https://www.postman.com/virtualstaging-ai/workspace/virtual-staging-ai-api/collection/6355387-724643b9-cbe2-4b05-b243-286d1445fcf7?action=share\&creator=6355387\&active-environment=6355387-2f176fce-cd09-41e2-ab8c-2fe92870105c) with example calls for each endpoint. Just plug in your API key as an environment variable (`vsai_api_key`) and try out the endpoints.
You'll need to copy around Render IDs from endpoint to endpoint to try some of the features.
There you can also generate code snippets.
[**Check out the Postman workspace**](https://www.postman.com/virtualstaging-ai/workspace/virtual-staging-ai-api/collection/6355387-724643b9-cbe2-4b05-b243-286d1445fcf7?action=share\&creator=6355387\&active-environment=6355387-2f176fce-cd09-41e2-ab8c-2fe92870105c)
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