compute
POST /v1/certificates/orders/{orderId}/submit
Buy the certificate. This spends money.
Authentication
Send an API key as a bearer token. The key must carry the billing.payment.manage permission; a key without it is refused with 403, not 404.
This endpoint takes no organisation id. Your key already identifies the organisation it belongs to, and the response is scoped to it.
Try it
Replace anything in angle brackets with your own values, and the key placeholder with a key from your dashboard.
curl -X POST https://api.zinndigital.com/v1/certificates/orders/{orderId}/submit \
-H "Authorization: Bearer zdk_live_…" \
-H "Content-Type: application/json" \
-d '{ "csr_pem": <string> }'Signed in? The API console in your dashboard fills in your real organisation id and your own key, and runs the request against the live API so you can see the actual response. Open this endpoint in the API console
Details
⛔⛔ **This is the call that charges.** It is a separate endpoint from the one that creates the order precisely so a client cannot buy while a form is half filled in. ⛔⛔ **The CSR is required and is checked three times** — here, in the service and in the driver. That is not belt-and-braces: the authority accepts an order **without** one, charges for it, and issues nothing. Two such orders were created against our own account on 2026-08-29 by a probe reading validation errors, and the giveaway is how unlike a purchase they look — no common name, no issue date (`docs/272` §9). ⭐ A customer-generated CSR is the better path and the one to encourage: the private key then never leaves their machine. Answers `503` when the authority could not be reached — in which case the order is recorded and reconciled rather than lost. Requires `billing.payment.manage`.
Parameters
| Name | Type | Required | What it is |
|---|---|---|---|
orderId (path) | Uuid | Yes | The order's id, as `listCertificateOrders` reports it. Ours (UUIDv7). |
Request body
| Name | Type | Required | What it is |
|---|---|---|---|
csr_pem | string | Yes | The certificate signing request, PEM. ⛔ Required. Without it the authority has nothing to sign and the order is billed and permanently unusable. |
Response
| Name | Type | Required | What it is |
|---|---|---|---|
id | Uuid | Yes | UUIDv7 identifier — sortable by creation time (docs/02 §8). |
product_code | string | Yes | The stable machine key (`positive_ssl`). ⛔ Match on this, never on `product_name` — the name is the certificate authority's marketing string and can be corrected without the pro… |
product_name | string | Yes | What the customer reads — the authority's own product name (`PositiveSSL`, `S/MIME Personal`, `Unified Communications Certificate (UCC)`). ⛔ Never a translation key: these are t… |
state | string<pending, awaiting_validation, issued, cancelled, failed, expired> | Yes | ⛔⛔ **`awaiting_validation` means PAID AND NOT ISSUED.** The authority charges at order time and then waits for the customer to prove they control the domain. It is deliberately… |
common_name | string | Yes | The primary domain on the certificate. |
domains | string[] | Yes | Additional names (SANs). Empty for a single-domain product. |
period_years | integer | Yes | — |
price_minor | integer | Yes | What the customer is charged, frozen at order. A copy rather than a join, so an operator repricing the catalogue cannot move an existing bill. |
currency | string | Yes | — |
validation_instructions | string | Yes | What the customer must still do, in the authority's own words. ⭐ Carried as text rather than parsed: every authority words it differently, and a half-parsed instruction is worse… |
certificate_pem | string | Yes | The issued certificate. ⭐ Public by nature — it is served to every visitor of the site — which is why it is returned here while its **private key never is**: a customer-generate… |
chain_pem | string | Yes | — |
message | string | Yes | Why it failed or was cancelled, in a sentence the customer reads. |
ordered_at | string | Yes | — |
issued_at | string | Yes | — |
expires_at | string | Yes | — |
days_until_expiry | integer | Yes | Whole days until `expires_at`, negative once it has lapsed. ⛔ `null` and `0` are DIFFERENT answers and a client must not collapse them: `null` means we could not read an expiry… |
renewable | boolean | Yes | Whether to offer a re-order now — issued, inside the 30-day window, and with no renewal already in flight. ⛔ Computed here rather than left to a client to derive from `expires_a… |
free_alternative_exists | boolean | Yes | Whether Let's Encrypt issues this kind of certificate for nothing. Carried onto the renewal prompt for the same reason it is on the buy screen: say so **before** asking somebody… |
renewal_of | Uuid | Yes | The order this one renews, so a client can show the chain. |
last_reminded_at | string | Yes | When the renewal sweep last REACHED this order — which is not the same as when it last emailed about it. ⛔ The sweep stamps this for every row it reaches **including the ones it… |
Errors this endpoint can return
401 · 403 · 404 · 422 · 429 · 503