API

Free during beta. The same generator this site runs, callable from your own code. 479 templates, of which 311 have been checked against the published standard drawings — and the API tells you which.

Start here

Once you have a key, this works from any terminal:

curl -H "Authorization: Bearer YOUR_KEY" -o box.dxf \
  "https://boxblanks.com/api/v1/dieline?code=0201&L=400&W=300&D=200&format=dxf"

That is a 400 × 300 × 200 mm regular slotted case as a DXF, ready for a cutting table. Change format to pdf, svg or json and everything else stays the same.

Every format returns the flat blank — the dieline itself, with cut, crease and perforation on separate layers. There is no folded 3D view in the API: the one on this site is built in the browser from the same geometry, and if you want that in your own interface you would render it yourself from format=json. The SVG is a drawing of the blank and can be dropped straight into a page.

The key can go in an Authorization: Bearer header, an X-API-Key header, or as ?key= on the query string — whichever your system can manage. Plenty of the things that would call this are report writers and spreadsheet macros that cannot set a header.

What "free during beta" means

It means free, now, with no card and no commitment — and that we are not promising it is free forever. Saying so plainly at the start seems better than saying "free" and revisiting it later, which is the sort of thing that makes people feel caught out.

If it does become paid, it will be because enough people are running it inside real products for that to make sense, and we would come to those people directly rather than switching something off. Anything built during the beta will get fair notice.

Endpoints

Base URL https://boxblanks.com/api/v1. Everything returns JSON except a generated drawing, which returns the file itself with its own content type. Responses carry Access-Control-Allow-Origin: *, so browser code can call this directly.

GET /dieline

Generate a dieline. The only required parameter is code; every dimension falls back to that template's own sensible default, so ?code=0201 alone returns a real box.

Set mode deliberately. It decides whether your dimensions describe the inside of the finished box, the crease lines, or the outside, and it changes how much board the blank uses. A 0201 at 400 × 300 × 200 comes out at 0.7322 m² on inside and 0.7030 m² on outside — about 4% of the board, on every quote, if you price by area. It defaults to inside, which is what most customers mean when they say a box needs to fit something, but it is worth being explicit rather than inheriting a default.

format=json returns no drawing at all — just the blank's size, area and piece count. That is the cheap call for a quoting system that needs to price board and never renders anything:

curl -H "Authorization: Bearer YOUR_KEY" \
  "https://boxblanks.com/api/v1/dieline?code=0201&L=400&W=300&D=200&format=json"

{
  "code": "0201",
  "name": "Regular Slotted Container (RSC)",
  "verified": "plate",
  "blank": { "widthMm": 1447, "heightMm": 506, "areaM2": 0.732182, "pieces": 1 },
  "counts": { "panels": 13, "creases": 12, "outline": 1 },
  "warnings": []
}

POST /dieline

Identical, but takes JSON — which is how you set a template's own parameters, since those are an object rather than a flat query string:

curl -X POST https://boxblanks.com/api/v1/dieline \
  -H "Authorization: Bearer YOUR_KEY" \
  -H "content-type: application/json" \
  -d '{"code":"0201","L":400,"W":300,"D":200,"format":"dxf","params":{"glueLap":40}}' \
  -o box.dxf

GET /templates

The whole catalogue. Filter with ?family=FEFCO, ?verified=plate, or ?q= for a free-text search across codes, names, descriptions and tags.

curl -H "Authorization: Bearer YOUR_KEY" \
  "https://boxblanks.com/api/v1/templates?verified=plate" | jq '.count'

GET /templates/{code}

One template in full, including every parameter with its range and default. Call this before generating if you are building a form — it tells you exactly what that template accepts, so you never have to hard-code a list that goes stale.

Each parameter carries a kind (number, bool or enum), a label, a default, and whatever else applies: min, max, step and unit for a number, options for an enum, and a line of help text. It is enough to render a control from, rather than describe one.

It also carries advanced, which is the flag this site uses to decide what sits behind a "show advanced" toggle. Most styles mark at least one — a 0216 marks slot and taper but not glueLap. Honouring it is the difference between offering a customer three fields and seven.

GET /usage

What your own key has spent, and what is left. Returns both allowances with the time until each refills, plus your recorded totals and a breakdown by endpoint — so "are we near the limit" has an answer that does not involve emailing us.

curl -H "Authorization: Bearer YOUR_KEY" https://boxblanks.com/api/v1/usage

{
  "plan": "trial",
  "trial": { "endsAt": "2026-10-03T09:12:44.000Z", "over": false },
  "allowance": {
    "quota":  { "limit": 30000, "remaining": 29847, "resetSeconds": 6612, "per": "month" },
    "minute": { "limit": 60, "remaining": 236, "resetSeconds": 1 }
  },
  "recorded": { "calls": 153, "units": 594, "throttled": 0, "errors": 1 }
}

It reports the asking key and nothing else — there is no view here of anyone else's traffic. The counts exclude the request asking for them, which is recorded once it has been answered.

POST /report

The one route that needs no key — it is the form on every template page, used by people who have no reason to have one. Tell us a template is wrong. Send code, a category, and actual describing what you got; expected, evidence and a state object are all worth including because they are what makes a report fixable. Give an email and set notify to be told when it is fixed.

The field no other generator returns

Every template carries verified. "plate" means that blank has been compared by machine against the drawing published in the FEFCO Code and matched it. "approx" means the construction is right and it folds, but it has not been matched against a plate in that detail.

This matters if you are putting our output in front of your own customers. You can filter to only the checked ones, or show the distinction rather than implying a confidence nobody measured. How the check works explains what it does, and — just as importantly — the four things it cannot do.

Coverage is not uniform, and the average flatters it. Corrugated is the better-covered half:

An unchecked template is usually not one that failed. Most are trade and display styles that appear in neither published standard, so there has never been a plate to compare them against — which is a different thing from a blank we measured and found wanting, and the API says which you are looking at.

Rate limits

Two limits, and they both depend on your plan. During the beta a key gets 30,000 calls a month, which is far more than a real integration uses.

The second is a per-minute ceiling, and it is the one worth understanding. It is measured in units rather than calls: generating a drawing counts as 4, since it is the only call that does real work, and reading the catalogue counts as 1. Batch work feels this limit; a configurator responding to a person never will.

Both refill continuously rather than resetting. The monthly allowance is a bucket, not a counter that clears on the 1st — spend a month's worth in an afternoon and it comes back steadily rather than locking you out for three weeks, and a quiet month is not lost.

The monthly figure is set well above what a real integration needs, and is not there to meter you. What it actually prevents is a loop in somebody's code quietly running all night.

Every response reports both buckets. RateLimit-Limit, RateLimit-Remaining and RateLimit-Reset describe the per-minute bucket; RateLimit-Quota-Limit, RateLimit-Quota-Remaining and RateLimit-Quota-Reset describe the monthly one, and RateLimit-Policy states both windows. A refusal is a 429 with Retry-After in seconds.

The older RateLimit-Day-* headers are still sent, reporting the same bucket, so nothing already reading them breaks. They are deprecated: the allowance is monthly now, and RateLimit-Quota-* is the pair to read.

Watch the monthly figure rather than the per-minute one. The minute bucket refills in seconds and nobody plans around it; the monthly allowance is the one that can stop a working afternoon, and it is the sensible thing to alert on. GET /usage returns the same numbers on demand if you would rather ask than read headers.

Cache, and you will probably never see either limit. Generation is deterministic: the same code at the same dimensions in the same format returns byte-identical output every time, so a cache keyed on those is safe to keep indefinitely. Most callers ask for the same few hundred boxes over and over. A template's parameters change about never, so those are worth holding too.

If you are generating a live preview as somebody types, debounce it — regenerating on every keystroke in a dimension field will reach the per-minute ceiling almost immediately. Generate on blur, or after a pause.

If your job genuinely needs more, email us and say what it is doing; that is exactly the sort of thing we want to hear.

Errors

Standard status codes, and a JSON body with an error that says what to change. Bad input is rejected rather than quietly corrected: ask for a 20-metre box and you get a 400, not a silently clamped 5-metre one, because the first is a bug you want to hear about and the second is one you find at the cutting table.

Terms, briefly

Free during beta, including inside a product you charge for, and you will get 30 days’ notice by email before any charge applies to you.

Every file carries a small Box Blanks line — metadata and a margin note in SVG, a header field in DXF, the document properties in PDF. Please keep it on files you pass to a customer. Removing it for production is fine and expected: it is its own layer so a die maker can drop it before cutting. If you need it off what you publish as well, get in touch and we will sort something out.

There is no uptime guarantee and no support contract, so do not put it on a critical path without caching. And as everywhere else on this site: a dieline is a drawing, not a guarantee — always cut and fold a sample before committing to a die.

The full API terms are short and worth two minutes if you are shipping this in a product.