Pika API: the official developer site, billing and endpoints

Pika publishes an official API, and it lives on a domain of its own: dev.pika.art, with a second official surface at mcp.pika.art. The developer site and the consumer product at pika.art bill separately, and search results for this topic are dominated by resellers.

What the official Pika API is, and where it lives

Pika states the model plainly: The API is self-serve — sign in, create an API key, and you get access to every Pika model listed above along with a quickstart guide.

Keys come from dev.pika.art/keys, the customer base URL is https://api.dev.pika.art, and the spec index is dev.pika.art/llms.txt. The Pika topic hub covers the model side.

One stale page misleads people: the consumer FAQ still answers the API question with We're taking on select partners. Interested? Learn more and apply here: https://pika.art/api, an application-only reply, while that link today renders the self-serve Pika API Club page.

Two layers of billing on the developer site

dev.pika.art bills twice.

Layer one: the club membership

Membership is $10/month and unlocks member (wholesale) pricing. New members get a credit toward the first month of usage, and mcp.pika.art never mentions the fee at all.

Layer two: pay-as-you-go usage

Beyond the fee, model usage is pay-as-you-go. You only pay for what you actually generate, at member rates. Pika’s own models list these rates:

Read the units, not the headline: video bills per second, Pikaffects, Pikadditions and Pikaswaps per request, the wider catalog per image and per 1M tokens. Most models are $0.04/sec at 720p and $0.06/sec at 1080p, with volume discounts above 10,000 seconds a month.

None of this shares a ledger with pika.art, where consumer plans run on video credits from Basic at $0 to Fancy at $76 a month. API usage is metered in micro_usd (divide by 1,000,000); no conversion between the two is published.

Authentication: put the API key in the request header

Every call carries the key in a header; the spec names two accepted forms: X-API-Key: $PIKA_API_KEY or Authorization: Bearer $PIKA_API_KEY. Google's x-goog-api-key is not accepted.

That line is the first wall for anyone from Google tooling. Pika’s onboarding prompt states the rule: Never ask me to paste it into chat, expose it in browser code, or commit it.

Three catalog endpoints need no key, including GET /catalog/apis and POST /catalog/apis/{api_id}/quote.

Three hops: submit, poll, fetch

The official convention is three steps: 1. POST /v1/media/{api_id} with that model's JSON body 2. Poll GET /v1/media/jobs/{request_id} until status == "completed" 3. Fetch GET /v1/media/jobs/{request_id}/content for the result url.

# Step 1 — submit an image-to-video job for Pika 2.5.
# The JSON body belongs to the model: fetch its spec, then post it.
# Spec: https://dev.pika.art/llms/pika/pika-2.5/image-to-video
curl -X POST https://api.dev.pika.art/v1/media/pika/pika-2.5/image-to-video \
  -H "X-API-Key: ${PIKA_API_KEY}" \
  -H "Content-Type: application/json" \
  -d @pika-2.5-image-to-video.json

The reply is the job object; the loop needs two fields:

{
  "request_id": "req_xxxxxxxx",
  "status": "completed"
}

# Steps 2 and 3 — poll the job, then read the result url.
JOB_ID=req_xxxxxxxx        # request_id from the submission response

until [ "$(curl -s "https://api.dev.pika.art/v1/media/jobs/${JOB_ID}" \
    -H "X-API-Key: ${PIKA_API_KEY}" | jq -r .status)" = "completed" ]; do
  sleep 5
done

curl -s "https://api.dev.pika.art/v1/media/jobs/${JOB_ID}/content" \
  -H "X-API-Key: ${PIKA_API_KEY}" | jq .

Uploads use a presigned URL valid for 5 minutes; an unsupported content_type returns 415, and a file over the cap — 20 MB image and audio, 50 MB video — returns 413. Pika does not publish how long a result URL stays valid.

Keyframe generation through the Pikaframes path

Pikaframes is the consumer-side feature name; the API exposes the same capability as Pika 2.5 Keyframe, at the path /models/pika/pikaframes/image-to-video and the api_id pika/pikaframes/image-to-video. Both frames are uploaded first, so both presigned URLs expire in five minutes.

# Pikaframes — same three hops, a different api_id.
curl -X POST https://api.dev.pika.art/v1/media/pika/pikaframes/image-to-video \
  -H "X-API-Key: ${PIKA_API_KEY}" \
  -H "Content-Type: application/json" \
  -d @pika-pikaframes.json

The hands-on walkthrough covers the same feature from the interface side.

api_id discipline and the aggregator catalog

Send the slashes in api_id literally — pika/pika-2.5/image-to-video is a path, not a product version number. Where the agent page and the spec index disagree, trust dev.pika.art/llms.txt.

Expect a wider catalog than the name: 155 callable operations covering 100+ models from Pika, ByteDance, Google, OpenAI, Kling, Alibaba, Anthropic, Black Forest Labs, DeepSeek, ElevenLabs, Ideogram, Meta, MiniMax, Recraft and more. Pika’s own recommended starting point for text-to-video does not include Pika 2.5; it names Seedance and MiniMax first. Our Seedance hub covers that line.

What the vendor has not published

Numbers a procurement review will ask for are unpublished:

• The complete per-model price list; dev.pika.art/pricing is a client-side calculator.
• Expected time per job, timeout thresholds and job retention.
• Enterprise concurrency figures; only the default is published, 60 requests per minute and 10 concurrent jobs.
• An official SDK, the quote response fields, and the technical parameters of Pika 2.5.

Frequently asked questions

Is the Pika API official and open to anyone? Yes — documented on Pika’s own domains, self-serve to start, and only the consumer FAQ still describes an application.

Do I pay a monthly fee first? dev.pika.art says membership is $10/month; mcp.pika.art calls the same API self-serve and never mentions a fee.

What does one image-to-video call cost? Pika 2.5 lists from $0.04 / sec, and the FAQ range is $0.04/sec at 720p and $0.06/sec at 1080p.

Can I use the output commercially? API output is licensed for commercial use under your Pika API agreement. Consumer Basic and Standard plans cannot use content commercially, and Pika does not explain how the two regimes interact.

Is there an SDK, and how long does a job take? Neither is published — poll on status and set your own timeout.

Fix three things before you build: the official host, your billing layer, and the exact api_id.

Published

Sep 14, 2026

Information verified

Sep 14, 2026

By

AI Tool Blog Editorial Team