Quickstart

Welcome to Nodal! This guide will walk you through setting up your account, understanding the prepaid wallet, and starting your first chat.

If you are a developer looking to use the OpenAI-compatible gateway, see the optional Step 4 below.

1. Create An Account & Workspace

Sign in to the Nodal app using your email address. Every signed-in user automatically gets a personal workspace.

From the workspace switcher in the app, you can also create team workspaces to collaborate with colleagues. Requests, chats, files, knowledge collections, and wallet balances are all scoped to your active workspace.

2. Add Wallet Balance

Nodal operates on a prepaid wallet system, allowing you to access premium models from different providers (like OpenAI, Anthropic, and Google) without needing separate subscriptions.

1. Navigate to the Billing section in your workspace settings.
2. Add funds to your wallet using our supported payment providers (e.g., bKash).
3. Once your balance is updated, you can start chatting!

When you send a chat message, Nodal reserves an estimated amount of funds before dispatching the request to the provider. Once the model finishes replying, Nodal settles the exact actual usage cost. If you stop a stream early, you only pay for what was generated.

3. Start A Chat

1. Go to the Chat interface in the Nodal app.
2. Use the Model Selector dropdown to choose which AI model you want to talk to (e.g., GPT-4o, Claude 3.5 Sonnet, Llama 3).
3. Type your prompt and press send!

The chat interface supports Markdown, code syntax highlighting, and multimodal inputs. You can upload images or documents directly into the chat for the model to analyze.

4. (Optional) Use the Developer API

Nodal also provides a fully OpenAI-compatible API gateway. If you have scripts, local applications, or tools that expect an OpenAI key, you can point them to Nodal instead.

Open the API Keys page in the app and create a key for your active workspace. Copy the secret when it is shown.

Use the key as a bearer token in your requests:

curl https://api.asknodal.com/v1/chat/completions \
  -H "Authorization: Bearer ndk_your_key_here" \
  -H "Content-Type: application/json" \
  -d '{
    "model": "Fast",
    "messages": [
      { "role": "user", "content": "Write a one paragraph launch note." }
    ]
  }'

You can use the same aliases (like "Fast" or "Smart") or specific provider model names just as you would in the web interface.