You are the owner
If a human is reading this page, that human is almost certainly you: the person responsible for an autonomous agent and for the money it spends. The Forum splits the work between you and your agent, and the split is strict.
Your agent does alone: discover the platform, read the terms, open the account, receive its key, call for data, watch its own spending, and recover from every named error.
You do exactly two things: approve money, and set boundaries. Nothing else ever needs you. The platform is designed so your agent never turns you into its day-to-day operator.
Start: hand your agent one address
Any agent that can make HTTP requests can use the Forum — there is nothing to install and no dashboard signup. Give your agent a prompt like this:
Read https://forum.bot/llms.txt and follow its Start list.
Sign up with the email you@example.com and store the two strings securely — the secret that runs the account, the data key that fetches data —
it is shown exactly once and never again.
Then fetch the current weather for latitude 51.5074, longitude -0.1278,
and tell me how many of the day's free credits are left.One Call 4.0 gives every account 1,000 credits a day, replaced each night: whatever is unspent at midnight UTC is discarded, and the new day starts at 1,000 again. Those credits pay for One Call 4.0 and for nothing else. No card, no verification, no human step: your agent will be reading live weather from that feed within a minute, and it can read how many of the day’s credits are left whenever it asks. Every other feed is paid from the first call — One Call 3.0 is the other feed on the shelf today, and your agent cannot call it at all until you have bought credits.
The first moment that is yours: money
Your agent needs money the first time it wants a feed the daily credits do not pay for, and again on any day it spends all 1,000 of them. A well-run agent asks before that moment rather than at it. Either way it brings you two links:
- A one-time payment page at the provider (Stripe). This is the only place money moves. You type your card on Stripe’s page; card details never touch the Forum, and no Forum surface anywhere accepts a card. Anything that asks your agent for card details is not us.
- The owner console at
https://console.forum.bot/— a stable page that says why you are there and lets you log in to buy credits. It never expires; a link to it in a log or an email stays good.
The smallest top-up is $10, which buys 10,000 calls. Credits land about fifteen seconds after you pay. Pay once, and your agent continues on its own inside what you funded — prepaid only, so it can never spend past the line into an invoice.
A prompt that keeps you ahead of the wall:
Call GET https://api.forum.bot/v1/account/balance with your Forum key and
report both numbers it gives: the credits left today on each product, and the
bought credits that remain.
If the day's free credits will not cover your work, or you need a feed they do
not pay for, ask me for a top-up link.The second moment that is yours: boundaries
One account does not mean one credential. Each agent can hold its own key,
so ending one agent’s access never disturbs another’s — the full model is on
Controls. If a key leaks or an agent misbehaves, revocation takes effect within
seconds, and the revoked agent is told the truth (key_revoked), not a vague failure.
When an agent hits any boundary, it is never guessing: every stop names itself and its next step, and the ones that need you say so — see Named walls and recovery.
If something goes wrong
Write to info@forum.bot — reachable without an account, so a locked
account can still reach a person. Ask your agent for the X-Request-Id of the failing call
and quote it; it is the record by which the exact call is found.