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Quickstart

Send your first event and create an invoice in under 5 minutes
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This guide walks you through the core Afternoon workflow: authenticating, creating a customer, sending a billable event, and generating an invoice.

Prerequisites

1. Create a customer

$curl -X POST https://api.afternoon.co/v1/customers \
>  -H "Authorization: Bearer ak_live_YOUR_API_KEY" \
>  -H "Content-Type: application/json" \
>  -d '{
>    "name": "Acme Corp",
>    "email": "billing@acme.com",
>    "external_id": "cust_123"
>  }'
Response
1{
2  "success": true,
3  "customer": {
4    "id": "cm5x9z8nv0000h85r7l9p2k1m",
5    "name": "Acme Corp",
6    "email": "billing@acme.com",
7    "external_id": "cust_123",
8    ...
9  },
10  "request_id": "req_abc123"
11}

Save the customer.id — you’ll need it in the next steps.

2. Send a billable event

$curl -X POST https://api.afternoon.co/v1/events/ingest \
>  -H "Authorization: Bearer ak_live_YOUR_API_KEY" \
>  -H "Content-Type: application/json" \
>  -d '{
>    "events": [
>      {
>        "event_name": "api.request",
>        "idempotency_key": "evt_abc123xyz",
>        "customer_id": "cm5x9z8nv0000h85r7l9p2k1m",
>        "timestamp": "2024-01-15T10:30:00Z",
>        "properties": {
>          "tokens": 150,
>          "model": "gpt-4"
>        }
>      }
>    ]
>  }'
Response
1{
2  "success": true,
3  "accepted": 1,
4  "request_id": "req_def456"
5}

Events are queued for asynchronous processing. Use the idempotency_key to safely retry requests without creating duplicate events.

3. Create a draft invoice

$curl -X POST https://api.afternoon.co/v1/invoices \
>  -H "Authorization: Bearer ak_live_YOUR_API_KEY" \
>  -H "Content-Type: application/json" \
>  -d '{
>    "customer_id": "cm5x9z8nv0000h85r7l9p2k1m",
>    "collection_method": "send_invoice",
>    "days_until_due": 30,
>    "line_items": [
>      {
>        "description": "API calls — Jan 2024",
>        "quantity": 1,
>        "unit_amount_cents": 5000
>      }
>    ]
>  }'
Response
1{
2  "success": true,
3  "invoice": {
4    "id": "cm5x9z8nv0001h85r7l9p2k2m",
5    "status": "draft",
6    "total_cents": 5000,
7    "line_items": [...],
8    ...
9  },
10  "request_id": "req_ghi789"
11}

4. Finalize the invoice

Finalizing transitions the invoice from draft to open, assigns an invoice number, and generates a public payment URL.

$curl -X POST https://api.afternoon.co/v1/invoices/cm5x9z8nv0001h85r7l9p2k2m/finalize \
>  -H "Authorization: Bearer ak_live_YOUR_API_KEY"
Response
1{
2  "success": true,
3  "invoice": {
4    "id": "cm5x9z8nv0001h85r7l9p2k2m",
5    "status": "open",
6    "invoice_number": "INV-0001",
7    "public_invoice_url": "https://pay.afternoon.co/inv/abc123",
8    ...
9  },
10  "request_id": "req_jkl012"
11}

Next steps

Customers API

Create, update, and manage customer records

Subscriptions API

Attach customers to plans with recurring billing

Invoices API

Build, finalize, and void invoices with line items

Events API

Ingest billable usage events at scale