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Hive has three access lanes. Which one you use depends on whether a human is present when the agent connects.

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The anonymous lane

Add the endpoint and start asking. No account, no key. You get 25 material calls per IP each day, resetting at 00:00 UTC. Discovery calls do not count, so your agent can list tools and read schemas freely while it works out what to call. This lane exists so you can evaluate Hive properly before signing up. It is not meant for production traffic, and it is capped per IP rather than per user.

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OAuth for interactive clients

Clients like Claude, Cursor, VS Code, and ChatGPT authorize in the browser. You add only the URL. When the client first connects, it opens a browser window, you approve the connection, and the client stores the credential itself.
No secret goes in your config file with OAuth. If a setup guide tells you to paste a key into mcp.json, you are looking at the headless path by mistake.
You can review and revoke connected clients any time from dashboard settings. Disconnecting revokes every access and refresh token issued to that client.

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API keys for headless agents

Cron jobs, backends, and CI have no browser, so they use a key instead:
Create one at dashboard keys. A few things worth knowing before you do:
  • The full secret appears once, at creation. Hive stores a hash and a short non-secret prefix afterwards, so there is no way to retrieve it later. Put it in your secret manager immediately.
  • Credits are tracked on your account, not per key. Creating a second key does not give you a second allowance.
  • Disabling a key stops it authenticating once the change propagates. Disabled keys stay listed for audit history and stop counting toward your active key limit.
Never commit a Hive key or paste it into a client config that syncs to a repository. Use an environment variable or your platform’s secret storage.

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Which lane applies

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When a call is rejected

A rejected call tells you which lane failed and what to do next. The common cases:
  • Anonymous cap reached. You have used your 25 material calls for the day. Sign in, or wait for the 00:00 UTC reset.
  • Missing credential on a protected surface. The agent tried something the anonymous lane does not cover. Connect via OAuth or add a key.
  • Credits exhausted. Your plan’s monthly allowance is spent. Hive stops rather than billing overage, so requests fail with a clear quota error until the cycle resets.
See limits for how credits and rate limits work.