What Customers see
A Startup's Customers meet its Publication, the branded package of its Domain, Interfaces, packages, keys, docs, status page and Portal, and never the platform.
A Startup's Customers meet its Publication: the Domain, Interfaces, packages, keys, docs, status page and Portal of each Product, under the Startup's own Brand. Nothing inside a Publication names the platform.
What a Customer meets
A Customer of transcribe.fm installs the transcribe SDK, sets TRANSCRIBE_API_KEY and calls transcribe.fm/. Each part comes from one field of the Publication:
| What the Customer meets | Field | At transcribe.fm |
|---|---|---|
| API | api | https: |
| MCP server | mcp | https: |
Docs, with llms.txt and Markdown per page | docs | https: |
| Status page | statusPage | https: |
| Portal: keys, usage, billing, Tenant settings | portal | https: |
| SDK, CLI and MCP packages | packages | transcribe in each package registry |
| API keys | keyPrefix | transcribe_sk_live_… |
| Key variable | envPrefix | TRANSCRIBE_API_KEY |
| Webhook signature | webhookHeader | Transcribe-Signature |
| Error types | errorNamespace | https: |
The key prefix comes ahead of a fixed pattern, so secret scanners still recognize every leaked key from every Startup with one rule.
The published OpenAPI document, SDK and MCP tool list carry only the Verbs a Customer may call. Operator Verbs such as Offer.publish and Period.close stay out, so a Customer's Agent spends no context on calls it cannot make.
One address, two forms
Each Interface answers at a path on the canonical Domain: /api, /mcp, /docs, /portal. api.transcribe.fm is an alias that serves the same API in place.
The path is canonical because it needs nothing beyond the canonical Domain. It shares that Domain's certificate, works on a claimed name, and lets the Startup's App call its API from the same origin. A Startup that wants the conventional api. host pins the alias, and no Customer's code breaks.
A Customer's code and an Agent's MCP configuration hold the base address for years. So the address never changes after the first Customer holds it: a new Domain arrives as an alias, and a rebrand redirects.
Nothing names the platform
A Customer never sees api.sb, the platform's packages, its key variable or its signature header. The registry refuses a Publication whose fields carry any of them.
Each Startup keeps api.sb/ as its own namespace. Its Workers, its test environment and its previews use it, and no Customer is ever given it.
StartupBuilder is the Studio's own Publication, at api.sb with the startup-builder packages. So every tool a founder gets, from keys and usage to logs and the test environment, exists in each Startup's Publication for its own Customers.
Compiled from a Brand and a Version
A Publication compiles from the Brand and one Version. A restyle compiles a new Publication and leaves the API version alone, so the Brand changes without breaking a Customer's code.
A Customer's path carries one version, on the Startup's own route. Moving the Startup to a buyer at a sale moves the Domain, and with it every address a Customer holds.
Next
- Domains: how a Startup gets, keeps and moves the names its Publication answers on.
- Interfaces: one Verb on every Interface.
- SDK: the packages a Publication names.