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1. Sign up

Register at scout.chowmes.com/beta with your name and email. Scout provisions a hosted account and emails you a one-time API key. There is no self-serve dashboard signup for the key itself, the key only ever arrives by email, and it is shown in plaintext exactly once (in that email). Under the hood this hits: 
POST /v1/hosted/beta-key
Content-Type: application/json

{"name": "Ada Lovelace", "email": "ada@example.com"}
If an account already exists for that email, Scout returns the existing account status instead of a new key, it will not silently double-provision. Lost your key? See Support.

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2. Store your key

export SCOUT_HOSTED_BASE_URL="https://scout.chowmes.com"
export SCOUT_HOSTED_API_KEY="scout_live_paste_the_delivered_key"
Never commit this key, log it, or paste it into frontend code. Treat it like a database password.

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3. Check your account

curl "$SCOUT_HOSTED_BASE_URL/v1/hosted/me" \
  -H "Authorization: Bearer $SCOUT_HOSTED_API_KEY"
Returns your plan, remaining standard and browser credits, and per-plan limits, no raw key in the response.

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4. Make your first call

Scrape a single public page and get back markdown plus evidence: 
curl -X POST "$SCOUT_HOSTED_BASE_URL/v1/hosted/scrape" \
  -H "Authorization: Bearer $SCOUT_HOSTED_API_KEY" \
  -H "Content-Type: application/json" \
  -d '{"url":"https://example.com","formats":["markdown"],"timeout_ms":30000}'

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5. Read the evidence block

The response wraps the scrape result in hosted usage metadata: 
{
  "success": true,
  "hosted": {
    "tenant_id": "tn_..",
    "key_id": "key_..",
    "credits_charged": 1,
    "credit_type": "standard"
  },
  "scrape": {
    "success": true,
    "url": "https://example.com",
    "markdown": "# Example Domain\n..",
    "metadata": {
      "url": "https://example.com",
      "crawled_at": "2026-07-06T18:00:00Z",
      "title": "Example Domain",
      "word_count": 28
    },
    "content_hash": "sha256:..",
    "quality_score": 0.94,
    "duration_ms": 812
  }
}
hosted.credits_charged tells you exactly what this call cost. scrape.metadata and scrape.content_hash are your evidence, the source, the timestamp, and a hash you can use to detect drift on repeat runs. From here, see Endpoints for crawl, map, screenshot, products, and company runs, or Credits for how usage adds up against your plan.