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Vaki API

US giving via the Vaki USA Foundation

The mechanism: the key decides the entity

Section titled “The mechanism: the key decides the entity”

Which legal entity receives the money is a property of the API key you hold, not a field in the request. A Foundation-scoped key mints checkout links that collect into the Vaki USA Foundation’s own Stripe account instead of Vaki Colombia’s.

Nothing in your request body changes:

Terminal window
curl https://api.vaki.cohttps://public-api-staging.vaki.co/v1/checkout_links \
  -H "Authorization: Bearer $VAKI_API_KEY" \
  -H "Content-Type: application/json" \
  -H "Idempotency-Key: donation-N_2QFBQFJTY" \
  -d '{
    "vaki": "clinicalaliga",
    "amount": 5000,
    "currency": "USD",
    "external_reference": "DON_59LPC74YV"
  }'

That is the whole point of doing it this way. There is no entity flag to set, so there is no flag to forget: a request cannot accidentally collect into the wrong entity, and a leaked or misused key cannot redirect money to an entity it was not scoped for. Swapping environments already works like this — one credential, one destination — and this is the same idea applied to something with far worse failure modes.

The entity is recorded on the checkout link and on the payment it produces, so your reconciliation can tell the two apart without inferring anything from amounts or currencies. The exact field is published in the reference when the route ships; do not code against a name you guessed from this page.

What is real today

Section titled “What is real today”
  • The Vaki USA Foundation is an IRS-approved 501(c)(3), a separate legal entity with its own Stripe account. That is a fact about the entity, and it is why this page exists instead of a flat “no”.
  • The routing is being built — entity-scoped keys, entity recorded on the checkout link and the payment.
  • Keys are not issuable yet. There is nothing you can call today.

What you get from it before the tax question is settled

Section titled “What you get from it before the tax question is settled”

This part is worth stating plainly, because it is real and it arrives first:

  • A US donor gives in USD to a US entity. The charge is domestic — no currency conversion on the way in, and none of the cross-border spread a donor pays when their card reaches an entity abroad.
  • Cards behave normally. Issuer fraud heuristics treat a domestic charity charge very differently from a foreign one, and a declined card is a lost donation no amount of copy recovers.
  • Your integration does not change. Same endpoints, same request body, same url to redirect to. A different key.

None of that depends on the tax question below. It is a better donor experience on its own.

Why routing the money is not the whole answer

Section titled “Why routing the money is not the whole answer”

Getting a donation into a 501(c)(3)‘s account is necessary and not sufficient.

For a US donor’s gift to count as a gift to the Foundation, the Foundation has to exercise discretion and control over the funds: it decides, on its own charitable judgement, which projects it funds and on what terms. If a donor instead earmarks their gift for one specific beneficiary abroad and the Foundation merely passes the money through, that gift can be treated as having been made to the foreign beneficiary rather than to the Foundation — and a gift to a foreign beneficiary is not a gift to a US charity. What matters is the substance of the arrangement, not which account the money landed in.

So this is a governance question, not a formatting one. It is decided by how grants are reviewed, approved and documented — not by adding a receipt template to the platform. We are not your tax advisers and this page is not tax advice; what follows is the practical consequence for your integration.

What this means for you, today

Section titled “What this means for you, today”
  • Do not promise your donors a tax outcome. Not in your donation flow, not in your campaign copy, not in a confirmation email, not on Vaki’s behalf. Vaki does not issue US donor acknowledgments — the written receipt a US donor uses to substantiate a gift — and the discretion-and-control question above is not settled for partner-created causes.
  • Talk to us before you launch, not after. Write to soporte@vaki.co with the campaign you have in mind and who the money ultimately reaches. We will tell you exactly where this stands. That conversation is much cheaper before your donors have been told something.
  • You can build now. The integration is the one on this site; a Foundation key changes the destination, not your code. Nothing you write against /v1 today is wasted.
Section titled “Related”