Introduction

standards is a schema-driven platform for building business applications — CRMs, ERPs, and other data-heavy tools. The schema is the single source of truth: you declare your data model once, and the API, validation, and permissions all derive from it.

The REST API is served at:

https://api.standards.new/v1

The mental model

A few concepts cover almost everything you'll do with the API:

• Objects are your types — contacts, companies, deals. Developers declare them in code; end-users can extend them at runtime.
• Records are the rows of an object. Every CRUD and search endpoint is scoped to an object by name, e.g. /records/contacts.
• Files are uploaded binary blobs (PDFs, images) with metadata.
• Documents attach files to records. A document is an ordered pack of files; the schema's document attribute constrains the accepted MIME types and max file size.
• Schema endpoints let you inspect objects, their attributes, types, and views.

Every request is authenticated with an API key, and every error uses the same JSON shape — the error envelope — so you can handle failures uniformly.

Next steps

Get your first authenticated response in about five minutes with the Quickstart. Then dig into:

• Authentication — API keys and sessions.
• Working with records — filtering, pagination, and the record lifecycle.
• Search — full-text search across every object.
• Permissions — the role-based access model.
• Files and documents — uploads, document packs, and attachments.
• Errors — the error envelope and rate limits.
• CLI — the standards command-line tool.
• SDK — build on standards in TypeScript, with the schema in code.
• Reflex SDK — the typed surface Reflex code calls, and the compiler gate that checks it.

The full endpoint catalog lives in the Reference section of the sidebar, starting with records.