This guide is for teams that are taking Paybond from evaluation into an application or agent workflow. It assumes you already have a Paybond Gateway URL, a Harbor URL, and a service-account API key for a single tenant.
The Kit is designed for product teams, not platform operators. It covers the application-facing lifecycle: sessions, intents, capability verification, evidence submission, selected protocol helpers, and read-only Signal access.
Before you write code
- Confirm which tenant, environment, and settlement rail you are targeting.
- Decide where service-account API keys will live and how they will be rotated.
- Decide which application or tool operations should map to
allowedToolsorallowed_tools. - Decide what evidence payloads and artifacts you need to preserve for later review.
Shared responsibilities
Your team owns:
- Business configuration, tenant-specific credentials, and application-side signing material.
- The mapping between your business actions and Paybond operations.
- The evidence payloads your workflow will submit.
Paybond owns:
- Hosted Harbor, Gateway, and Signal services.
- Platform signing keys, shared infrastructure credentials, and hosted operational workflows.
- Enforcement of tenant binding, capability verification, and settlement rules.
Security model
- Tenant scope comes from authenticated credentials, not from caller-supplied tenant identifiers.
- Sessions are single-tenant. Create one client per tenant and service account.
- Capability tokens are intent-scoped. Never reuse a token across intents.
- Cache access tokens in memory only, and rotate them through the supported session APIs.
Recommended rollout
- Start with One-command guardrails using a Free Developer sandbox key.
- Open a Kit session and confirm the tenant returned by the Gateway matches the environment you expect.
- Run one sandbox guardrail around a representative paid tool and submit simulator evidence.
- Move to the TypeScript quickstart or Python quickstart when the workflow needs production intent creation, funding, and settlement.
- Add idempotency keys, structured logging, and credential rotation before moving to production.
- If you use an agent framework, layer in the Agent runtime tutorial, agent integrations, or the MCP server.
Signal reads
If your application needs standing or portfolio data, use the tenant-bound Signal helpers after the Harbor flow is working. That keeps the first rollout focused and makes it easier to separate settlement behavior from reporting behavior.
Production checklist
- Store service-account API keys and signing material in a secret manager.
- Use the same idempotency key when retrying the same write request.
- Log request IDs, status codes, tenant context, and intent IDs without logging secrets.
- Close SDK sessions cleanly so HTTP resources are released.
- Keep settlement confirmation in an operator-reviewed workflow unless you are calling the Harbor API directly by design.