Account & wallet

Static Ads Lab is API-first, but two steps must happen in the dashboard:

1. Sign up.
2. Top up your wallet.

Everything else — brands, products, audiences, design templates, image ads — is API-driven.

1. Sign up

Create an account with email or Google. The first time you sign in, you'll land in the onboarding flow.

Onboarding (recommended for first run)

Onboarding takes about three minutes:

• Paste your Shopify store URL — the platform auto-extracts your brand identity, top products, and a recommended audience.
• Pick one or more design templates from the public library.
• Top up the wallet (see below).
• Create your first API key.

When you're done, your workspace has a brand, a few products with variants, an audience or two, and a completed design template — all reachable via the API.

Skip onboarding (API-first)

If you'd rather build everything from the API, skip onboarding. You still need to:

• Top up your wallet (next section).
• Create an API key (Settings → API Keys).

Then follow Build your first Meta image ad for the API setup path.

2. Top up your wallet

Static Ads Lab uses wallet-based billing. Each successful generation deducts from your wallet balance.

You're only charged for successful generations. Failed jobs do not deduct from your wallet.

Top up at Settings → Billing. We accept credit cards via Stripe.

Insufficient balance

If your wallet can't cover a request, the API returns 402 Payment Required:

{
  "error": {
    "code": "INSUFFICIENT_BALANCE",
    "message": "Insufficient wallet balance. Your balance is $3.00, but this request costs $5.00. Please add funds at https://www.staticadslab.com/settings?tab=billing"
  },
  "meta": {
    "request_id": "req_abc123",
    "timestamp": "2026-04-30T14:30:00.000Z"
  }
}

Add funds, then retry.

3. Create an API key

1. Go to Settings → API Keys.
2. Click Create key, give it a name, and choose its scopes.
3. Copy the key — it starts with sal_live_ and is shown only once. Store it in your secrets manager.

API keys are scoped. Default scopes cover read/write across the public resources (brands, products, audiences, design templates, image ads, images). For a stricter posture, create separate keys per environment or per workflow.

See Authentication for the details.

What's next