How to Use Novita AI API in Droid: Quick Guide

Factory’s Droid is a high-performance software development agent that supports BYOK (Bring Your Own Key) for custom model providers. You can connect Novita AI to Droid in under 2 minutes by editing a single JSON config file — giving you access to powerful open-source models like Kimi K2.5 at a fraction of the cost.

What Is Droid?

Droid is an enterprise-grade AI coding agent by Factory AI. It works in your terminal and IDE (VS Code, Cursor, JetBrains), handling end-to-end development workflows — from analyzing code and implementing features to fixing bugs and running tests.

Droid supports BYOK through its configuration, letting you connect any OpenAI-compatible or Anthropic-compatible API provider.

Why Use Novita AI with Droid?

• Cost-Effective Open-Source Models

Novita AI provides access to 100+ open-source LLMs at competitive prices. Kimi K2.5 — a strong coding model with a 262K context window — is available at just $0.60/$3.00 per 1M input/output tokens.

👉Browse all available models on the Novita AI Models page.

• OpenAI and Anthropic-Compatible APIs

Novita AI’s LLM API is fully OpenAI-compatible, mapping directly to Droid’s generic-chat-completion-api provider. Novita AI also provides an Anthropic-compatible endpoint (https://api.novita.ai/anthropic).

Prerequisites

• Droid CLI installed:

# macOS / Linux
curl -fsSL https://app.factory.ai/cli | sh

# Windows
irm https://app.factory.ai/cli/windows | iex

• A Novita AI API key — Sign up at novita.ai and get your key from the API Key Management page.

Step-by-Step Setup

Step 1: Locate the Droid Configuration File

• macOS/Linux: ~/.factory/settings.json
• Windows: %USERPROFILE%\.factory\settings.json

Step 2: Add Novita AI Models

OpenAI-compatible endpoint:

{
  "customModels": [
    {
      "model": "moonshotai/kimi-k2.5",
      "displayName": "Kimi K2.5 (Novita AI)",
      "baseUrl": "https://api.novita.ai/openai",
      "apiKey": "<YOUR_NOVITA_API_KEY>",
      "provider": "generic-chat-completion-api",
      "maxOutputTokens": 64000
    }
  ]
}

Alternatively, Anthropic-compatible endpoint:

{
  "customModels": [
    {
      "model": "moonshotai/kimi-k2.5",
      "displayName": "Kimi K2.5 (Novita AI - Anthropic)",
      "baseUrl": "https://api.novita.ai/anthropic",
      "apiKey": "<YOUR_NOVITA_API_KEY>",
      "provider": "anthropic",
      "maxOutputTokens": 64000
    }
  ]
}

Step 3: Launch Droid and Select Your Model

cd /path/to/your/project
droid

Type /model to open the model selector. Your Novita AI models will appear under Custom models.

Demo

Droid (powered by Kimi K2.5 via Novita AI) building a landing page for a coffee shop:

Conclusion

Droid’s model-agnostic design means you’re not locked into any single provider. By connecting Novita AI, you get a wide selection of open-source models at competitive prices. The setup takes less than 2 minutes.

Novita AI is an AI & agent cloud platform helping developers and startups build, deploy, and scale models and agentic applications with high performance, reliability, and cost efficiency.

Frequently Asked Questions

• What is Droid?

Droid is an AI coding agent by Factory AI that works in your terminal and IDE.

• Is Droid free?

Droid offers a free tier with limited usage. You’ll also need API credits from your model provider (like Novita AI).

• Which Novita AI model should I use with Droid?

Kimi K2.5 is a strong choice — 262K context window at $0.60/$3.00 per 1M tokens. Browse all models on the Novita AI Models page.

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