How to Get a Cohere API Key — and Connect It to Your Product
Blog post from Unified.to
Cohere provides enterprise-grade language and embedding models, including endpoints for text generation, vector embeddings, reranking, and classification, and obtaining a Cohere API key is crucial for developers building AI-native SaaS products, internal assistants, or retrieval systems. The process involves creating a Cohere account, generating trial or production API keys, setting up billing, and securely storing the API keys using environment variables or secret managers. While trial keys offer limited access, production keys require billing setup and provide higher rate limits and pay-per-token pricing. Cohere can be integrated through Unified's Generative AI API, allowing seamless switching between multiple AI providers and reducing the need for separate integrations. Unified MCP enables Cohere to interact with customer SaaS platforms through tool-calling actions, ensuring structured and authorized data operations. For production deployment, it is essential to restrict tool scopes, limit permissions, monitor usage, and keep API keys secure, while Unified's infrastructure supports real-time, pass-through data access with usage-based pricing, enabling AI features to transition from experimentation to production effectively.