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Products & Surfaces

What are Products?

Products group the Flows and Agents that you expose as Capabilities. They connect those Capabilities to Surfaces, so you can choose how people and systems use them.

How Products work

Add related Flows and Agents to a Product as Capabilities. Then connect each Capability to one or more Surfaces where you want to expose it.

Every Product has two parts:

  • Capabilities: the Flows and Agents that belong to the Product. A Capability can also be an external agent that you connect through the Agent-to-Agent (A2A) protocol. Each Capability has a required name and an optional description.
  • Surfaces: the deployment configurations that expose Capabilities through an interface. Surface types include chat widgets, REST APIs, MCP servers, A2A agents, messaging channels such as Slack, SMS, and email, and webhooks. For the full list, see What are Surfaces?.

Clients see the Capability name and description. For example, an MCP Surface shows them as the tool name and description, and an A2A Surface shows them as the skill name and description. With the Runtype API, you can override the name and description for a single Surface without changing the Capability. Only enabled Capabilities are exposed.

You can reuse a Flow or Agent as a Capability in multiple Products. Each Product stores its own Capability name and description, so you can adapt how the resource appears in each Product.

Each Surface has a status:

  • Draft: the status of a new Surface. Most Surface types reject requests in Draft.
  • Active: the Surface accepts requests.
  • Paused: the Surface keeps its configuration and rejects new requests.

Each Surface type has its own authentication. Chat widgets use client tokens, and API and A2A Surfaces use API keys. MCP Surfaces use API keys by default and can also allow OAuth sign-in or public access.

Use test credentials to try a Surface and live credentials for production traffic. A Test API key is capped at 50 capability calls per day, and a Production API key has no daily cap. Test and live client tokens share the same session and rate limits. For more information, see Client tokens and domain restrictions and Authenticating with product API keys.

A Product owns its Surfaces, Capabilities, and API keys. Flows and Agents exist on their own. When you delete a Product, Runtype permanently deletes its Surfaces, Capabilities, and API keys. You choose whether to also delete the Flows and Agents that its Capabilities use.

You can create and manage Products in the dashboard, with the runtype CLI, with the Runtype API, or with the Runtype MCP server.

Example: a customer support Product

Dana manages support for Example Organization and wants to automate common requests while routing complex issues to the support team. Dana creates a customer support Product with these Capabilities:

  • FAQ answering Flow: answers common questions using the organization’s documentation as context.
  • Ticket routing Agent: analyzes incoming requests and assigns each request to the appropriate team.
  • Documentation search Flow: retrieves relevant help articles when a question goes beyond the FAQ.

Dana adds these Surfaces to the same Product:

  • Chat Widget: provides answers on the organization’s website.
  • REST API: powers the support interface in the organization’s mobile app.
  • Email: receives support requests and sends responses by email.

Dana sets each Surface to Active. The same Product then exposes the selected Capabilities through each configured channel.

Next steps

Choose a guide based on what you want to do: