Our Venmo Developer and Payouts APIs have been retired, and we are no longer able to provide access to businesses who may want to start using it. To find out more about how you can use Venmo as a payment method in your checkout experience, visit https://venmo.com/business/accept-venmo-in-stores.

For existing businesses who were granted access to the Developer or Payouts API in the past (generally prior to 2016), you will retain access to these APIs and may use them.

Build your app

This tutorial will show you how to create your developer app on Venmo and build a flow to let users give your app access to make Venmo API requests on their behalf.

1. Create a developer app

To create an app, sign in to your venmo account, go to your settings, and check out the 'Developer' tab. Keep in mind that your identity on Venmo must be verified before you can make an app.

On this page you can manage all things developer-related. In the 'Your applications' section, click 'Create your first app' to start creating your developer app. The minumum amount of information required is described below. You can always come back to this page to fill out other information.

App Name	This is the name your users will see.
App Description	Briefly describe the purpose of your application.
Web Redirect URL	Venmo will redirect your users to this address. Must be formatted like http(s)://www.example.com/example_redirect_url
Site URL	example.com, localhost:8080, etc.

Note: You must configure your application with a valid Web Redirect URL. Without a valid redirect uri on file, we will be unable to serve any authorization request for your app.

Now you have the credentials to ask users to authorize your app.

2. Authorize users and get access tokens

The following is a quick tutorial for client-side authentication. When you are ready to get an access token for a user, redirect them from your app to our authorization page with some information in the URL:

https://api.venmo.com/v1/oauth/authorize?client_id=CLIENT_ID&scope=make_payments%20access_profile

The parameters correspond to the following:

client id — The id for your app. You can find your app's client id on the Developer page in your account's settings.
scope — The information or actions your app wants access to.

You can find a list of all the scopes here.

If the user agrees to authorize your app, they will sign into their Venmo account and we will redirect them back to your app. We will redirect your user to the web redirect url that is set for your app or to the url specified as a parameter.

Note: If you want to build your redirect urls on-the-fly, you should use the redirect_uri parameter. You can learn more about all the available parameters on the authentication page.

All the useful information will be appended to the url we redirect to. Since we are doing client-side authentication, we will return an access token. For example, If our application had a redirect URL set to http://www.mygreatapp.com/venmo_oauth, we would redirect the user to the URL:

http://www.mygreatapp.com/venmo_oauth?access_token=4e4sw1111111111t8an8dektggtcbb45

4e4sw1111111111t8an8dektggtcbb45 is the access token. This is what you need to get information about the user or make payments on their behalf through the API. Because we used the client-side flow, this access token will expire in 30 minutes. For more information on how to get longer-lived tokens that last 60 days, check out our documentation on server-side flow here.

From here, you can grab the access token from the url and start interacting with Venmo on the user's behalf.

3. Make calls to the API

Here are a couple of example to get you started.

Get current user's information

To get more information about the user, make a HTTP GETrequest to the /me endpoint:

https://api.venmo.com/v1/me?access_token=4e4sw1111111111t8an8dektggtcbb45

you will get a JSON response like this:

{
  "data": {
    "balance": 102.3,
    "user": {
      "username": "delavara",
      "first_name": "Cody",
      "last_name": "De La Vara",
      "display_name": "Cody De La Vara",
      "is_friend": false,
      "friends_count": 165,
      "about": "So happy!",
      "email": null,
      "phone": null,
      "profile_picture_url": "https://venmopics.appspot.com/u/v3/s/6ecc7b37-5c4a-49df-b91e-3552f02dc397",
      "id":"1088551785594880949",
      "date_joined": "2013-02-10T21:58:05"
    }
  }
}

Note: The balance, email and phone fields are null. We require additional scopes to access this information since it is more sensitive. If you want access to these fields, be sure to include the necessary scopes.

Get user's list of friends

If you want to get a list of their friends, you can make a HTTP GET request to the /users/:user_id/friends endpoint:

https://api.venmo.com/v1/users/1088551785594880949/friends?access_token=4e4sw1111111111t8an8dektggtcbb45

Notice how the id returned from the /meendpoint is inserted into the URL above. You will receive a JSON response like this:

{
  "pagination": {
    "next": "https://api.venmo.com/v1/users/1088551785594880949/friends?after=161568197181440668&limit=3"
  },
  "data": [
    {
      "username": "kortina",
      "about": "make a joyful sound, la da da da",
      "last_name": "Kortina",
      "display_name": "Andrew Kortina",
      "first_name": "Andrew",
      "profile_picture_url": "https://venmopics.appspot.com/u/v5/s/25f9c7a0-5d5c-4988-8737-a3278d78ae42",
      "id": "145434160922624167"
    },
    {
      "username": "iqram",
      "about": "Frisbee enthusiast",
      "last_name": "magdon-ismail - organic",
      "display_name": "Iqram magdon-ismail - organic",
      "first_name": "Iqram",
      "profile_picture_url": "https://venmopics.appspot.com/u/v11/s/6c3740ad-26bd-475c-9da2-7cb3fd7591da",
      "id": "145436736225280235"
    },
    {
      "username": "staub",
      "about": "phonewalletbaby",
      "last_name": "Staub",
      "display_name": "Andrew Staub",
      "first_name": "Andrew",
      "profile_picture_url": "https://venmopics.appspot.com/u/v1/s/0b4b85ab-a72b-4326-a887-5bf7a08ff445",
      "id": "152710129123328341"
    },
    {
      "username": "azeem",
      "about": "No Short Bio",
      "last_name": "Ansar",
      "display_name": "Azeem Ansar",
      "first_name": "Azeem",
      "profile_picture_url": "https://venmopics.appspot.com/u/v1/s/2b797ba9-1bd5-41b8-a5a9-f133e128f234",
      "id": "161568197181440668"
    }
  ]
}

Make a payment on the user's behalf

If you want to pay someone on the user's behalf, we can make an HTTP POST request to /payments. If we wanted to pay an email address 5 dollars for delivery, we can send aHTTP POST to:

https://api.venmo.com/v1/payments

using cURL:

curl https://api.venmo.com/v1/payments -d access_token=4e4sw1111111111t8an8dektggtcbb45 -d email="someemail@gmail.com" -d amount=5 -d note="Delivery."

You will get a JSON response that looks like following:

{
  "data": {
    "balance": 5.00,
    "payment": {
      "id": "1322585333520059420",
      "status": "pending",
      "note": "Delivery.",
      "amount": 5.00,
      "action": "pay",
      "date_created": "2013-12-30T19:40:57.865985",
      "date_completed": null,
      "audience": "public",
      "target": {
        "type": "email",
        "phone": null,
        "email": "someemail@gmail.com",
        "user": null
      },
      "actor": {
        "username": "delavara",
        "first_name": "Cody",
        "last_name": "De La Vara",
        "display_name": "Cody De La Vara",
        "about": "So happy",
        "profile_picture_url": "https://venmopics.appspot.com/u/v3/s/6ecc7b37-5c4a-49df-b91e-3552f02dc397",
        "id": "1088551785594880949",
        "date_joined": "2013-02-10T21:58:05"
      },
      "fee": null,
      "refund": null,
      "medium": "api"
    }
  }
}