Documentation

Portal and console.

SanctiKey gives you two places to sign in, and they are not the same place. One handles money. One handles keys. Almost every early question we get is a person looking for something on the surface that does not hold it, so this page says plainly what lives where, and why we refused to put them together.

Two surfaces

The billing portal is on this website. It is the commercial relationship: the subscription, the payment method, the invoices, cancellation, and getting back in if you lose access to it.

The console is the product. It runs in the dedicated AWS account that your subscription provisioned, on its own address, and it holds the keys, the assets, the cryptographic operations, your users, and the audit trail.

Each surface has its own login, and neither login works on the other one.

The portal

The portal is the money surface. It carries four things:

• Signup and checkout. Your subscription starts here, before the console exists.
• Billing. Invoices, the payment method, and plan changes open on Stripe's hosted billing portal from a button in ours. We never display or store your card details.
• Cancellation. Ending the subscription is a portal action, on the same Stripe surface as the rest of the commercial record.
• Account recovery. Recovering the portal login when the password or the second factor is gone runs from the portal sign-in screen. A guide to it is being written.

What the portal cannot do is more interesting than what it can. It reads your subscription status and nothing else. There is no path from it to a key, to a cryptographic operation, to your audit trail, or to your data. Someone holding your portal password holds your billing history and no key material at all.

The console

The console is the key surface, and it is where your team works. It carries:

• Keys and assets. Creating keys, listing them, and opening one to see its detail, its partition and its regional placements.
• Cryptographic operations. Signing, verifying, encrypting and decrypting, and the certificate authority built on those keys.
• Users and permissions. Inviting people, assigning permission tiers, managing partitions, and connecting your identity provider. See Users and permissions and Federation.
• Audit. The record of every operation, readable in place and streamable into your own systems. See Audit.
• Buying more capacity. Additional keys, additional operation blocks, served regions, regional placements and failover pairs are all purchased here rather than on the website.

The console shows no invoice, no card, and no cancellation control. It moves what you are entitled to; it never shows how you pay for it.

Which login goes where

The portal has one login. It is created from the email address you paid with, and that address is the account owner. The portal has no self-service signup, so there is no second portal login to hand out and no way for one to appear without a purchase. It is deliberately a single seat, because everything behind it is a money decision.

The console has as many logins as you need. They live in a directory that belongs to your account and holds only your people: your administrators, your operators, your auditors. Accounts there are created by your administrators, never by self-service registration, and the first one is created for you at provisioning. If you connect your own identity provider, your people sign in through it instead.

Both surfaces require multi-factor authentication with an authenticator app. It is enforced at the identity layer on each of them, so enrollment is not a setting either one lets you decline.

Why they are separate

Money authority and key authority never share a surface. The person who can cancel the subscription is not, by that fact, a person who can sign with your firmware key, and the administrator who signs firmware all day cannot change your payment method or end your contract.

The practical consequence is the one that matters during an incident. A stolen portal password is a billing problem. It is not a key compromise, because the portal has no route to a key, and the credential that does reach your keys lives in a different directory in a different account with its own second factor. One breach does not become the other.

It also means you can staff them differently. Finance holds the portal seat. Your security team holds console administrator seats. Neither group needs the other's credential to do its own job.

How you get both

The website is the entrance, and it is the only time you use it to buy something. Signup and checkout happen here: you give an email address, you verify it before checkout will open, and you pay.

Your portal login is created from that checkout, after the payment, not before it. The temporary password arrives by email once the purchase completes, which is why there is nothing to sign in to while you are still deciding. Your dedicated account provisions in parallel, and a second email carries the console address and the first administrator credential for it.

Getting started walks that path in order, including the first sign-in on each surface.

Buying from inside the console

After signup, you never come back to the website to buy a key. You buy it in the console, on the screen that already shows how many keys you hold and how many you are paying for.

Behind that button, the console arranges the billing for you. It calls our billing service directly, and the charge goes to the payment method already on your subscription, prorated for the remainder of the current term. You do not enter a card, you do not start a new checkout, and you do not get a second subscription. The subscription quantity you already have simply goes up by one.

The charge is processed first and the capacity follows it. When the payment clears, your paid key count rises and the console reports the new number on the same screen, usually within a moment. The new key is then yours to create, and it appears among your assets as soon as you create it.

Lowering capacity works in the other direction. A reduction applies in the console immediately and decrements your next invoice, and you can never reduce below the keys you actually hold. Limits covers the ceilings and what each dimension costs you.

Quick reference

Where to go next

• The path from checkout to your first signature: Getting started.
• What a key is, and what you can change about it later: Keys.
• What each console permission tier can actually do: Users and permissions.
• What you are billed for and where the ceilings sit: Limits.