Quickstart: send your first message

This guide sends your first message in about five minutes.

1. Get your API key

Sign in to the dashboard, open Settings → API keys, and create a key. It authenticates every request you send and should never be exposed in a browser or mobile app — call it from your own backend.

The confirmation link is what creates your account. POST /v1/auth/signup answers 202 and creates nothing: the account, and its first API key, come into existence when you follow the link WeZend emails you. Sign up with a work email address — personal mailboxes (Gmail, Outlook, Yahoo, Proton) and temporary addresses are rejected — and expect the company fields to be required; POST /v1/auth/signup/lookup-vat fills them from the VAT registry. Lost the link? POST /v1/auth/send-verify-email sends a new one, valid 24 hours. An older account that never confirmed its address cannot send until it does: those messages are created with status suppressed and a reason, not queued.

2. Send a message

curl https://api.wezend.com/v1/messages/send \
  -H "X-API-Key: $WEZEND_API_KEY" \
  -H "Content-Type: application/json" \
  -d '{
    "to": "+4512345678",
    "channel": "sms",
    "message": "Hello from WeZend"
  }'

The example deliberately sends without a sender field, so the message uses your account's default sender — which works on a fresh account as soon as your email address is confirmed. A custom sender (your brand name) must be approved under Settings → Sender IDs first; an unapproved value is rejected with 403.

A successful call returns 201 with the message record:

{
  "message_id": "3fa1e2c0-...",
  "status": "queued",
  "channel": "sms",
  "to": "+4512345678",
  "cost": 0.045,
  "currency": "EUR",
  "created_at": "2026-07-08T10:00:00.000Z"
}

3. Check delivery

Poll GET /v1/messages/:message_id, or — better at any real volume — pass a webhook_url in the send request and receive delivery updates as they happen. See Webhooks.

Before your first real email: verify your domain

The send above goes out under WeZend's shared default sender. To send as your own domain — and to stay out of spam — add it under Settings → Domains first (GET /v1/account/email-domains). WeZend generates the exact records for your account: an SPF include:, a DKIM CNAME under WeZend's own selector, and a recommended DMARC starting at p=none.

Publish the DKIM record under the selector WeZend gives you — not one your mailbox host already uses for its own mail. They are different keys, and only WeZend's selector matches the signature we apply. Then call POST /v1/account/email-domains/:id/verify; the checks object says per record what passed and, if not, why. Keep DMARC at p=none until DKIM verifies, then tighten it. Full walkthrough: Email: domains, DNS & sending.

What needs enabling

Not everything is self-serve, and it's better to know now than to debug it later.

You don't need a list to see it work. The dashboard's first step sends one real message to the address you confirmed at signup — one click, no import, no contacts. It goes through the ordinary send path (POST /v1/onboarding/send-test), so it is quota-counted, routed, billed and on the timeline exactly like production traffic: what you see is what a customer would get, not a simulation. Importing contacts can wait until after something has visibly worked — which is the order that turns out to matter, because whoever sends at all sends within hours of signing up.

Next steps

• Authentication — API keys vs. dashboard sessions
• Sending messages — every field /v1/messages/send accepts, and channel fallback
• Rate limits — the real, current limits per endpoint