Amazon publishes no PA-API shutdown date. The real gate is ten sales
There is no shutdown date. Not a moved one, not a vague one. Amazon’s current pages carry no date at all, and that is a different thing from a date nobody agrees on.
The rule that does gate a new site sits on the Creators API introduction page: at least 10 qualifying sales in the past 30 days before you can access the API.
I went looking because every version of this story prints one, and the printed dates disagree with each other. April 30th. May 15th. June 30th. January 31st. All of them get stated flatly, and none of them come with a link to an Amazon page that says so.
I filmed the walk through these pages, if you would rather watch than read.
Where did the PA-API 5 documentation go?
webservices.amazon.com/paapi5/documentation/ does not serve documentation. It answers with a 302 to a single notice on Associates Central. I tried a deep sub-page as a control, the old rates page of all things, and it lands in exactly the same place. Whatever URL you have bookmarked from the v5 docs, that is where it goes.
The notice says PA-API 5 has been deprecated, that the Creators API replaces it, and that if your application still calls v5 you should “plan your migration to the Creators API to avoid disruption.”
read that for what is missing. No date. No grace period, and nothing about how long the old endpoint keeps answering. I searched the thirteen Creators API doc pages I could retrieve for any date string and for deprecat, sunset, retire, shut down and end of life. The only date on any of them is the footer copyright. That was the state on 4 August.
Amazon did publish a date. Twice, and they were different
This is the part worth checking on me, so both captures are here in full.
The Internet Archive’s 17 February 2026 capture of the v5 docs, banner text:
“PA-API will be deprecated on April 30th, 2026. Please migrate to Creators API. See documentation at https://affiliate-program.amazon.com/creatorsapi/docs/en-us/introduction .”
The 26 April 2026 capture, same page, same banner, same sentence:
“PA-API will be deprecated on May 15th, 2026. Please migrate to Creators API. See documentation at https://affiliate-program.amazon.com/creatorsapi/docs/en-us/introduction .”
One word changed between those two captures and it was the date. The archive’s index shows the page returning 200 through that April capture and returning 302 from 25 July onward, so the sequence runs April 30th, then May 15th, then a redirect.
That accounts for most of the disagreement on the open web. People quoted the banner accurately. The banner moved under them.
The other dates in circulation are a different problem. June 30th and May 15th both turn up in forum threads and blog posts quoted from emails Amazon sent to associates rather than from anything published. They are probably real emails. I cannot check somebody’s inbox, Amazon does not publish them, and I am not going to repeat a deadline I can only reach through somebody else’s screenshot.
Two archive captures from November and December 2025 came back at around 3,500 bytes and did not include the banner region, so I cannot tell you whether the banner existed before February. Those captures do not show it. That is the whole of what I know about it.
What a deprecated call returns, according to the docs
The deprecation notice publishes the response an old integration gets: HTTP 403, an AccessDeniedException, code AccessDenied, and this message.
“Product Advertising API is deprecated. Please migrate to Creators API using the migration guide at https://affiliate-program.amazon.com/creatorsapi/docs/en-us/migrating-to-creatorsapi-from-paapi.”
The version that circulates stops after “Creators API.” It is a truncation, and it reads like a finished sentence, which is presumably why it spreads. Amazon’s string runs on through the migration guide URL and takes its only period after it.
That payload is documented behaviour. It is what Amazon says a v5 call gets, written on a page Amazon controls about a system Amazon runs.
The endpoints are still up
So I sent an unsigned POST at one to find out what it would say. No credentials needed, which means you can run this yourself:
curl -X POST https://webservices.amazon.com/paapi5/searchitems \ -H "Content-Type: application/json; charset=utf-8" \ -H "X-Amz-Target: com.amazon.paapi5.v1.ProductAdvertisingAPIv1.SearchItems" \ -H "Content-Encoding: amz-1.0" \ -d '{"Keywords":"test","PartnerTag":"x","PartnerType":"Associates"}'HTTP 400, and the identical body from webservices.amazon.com, webservices.amazon.co.uk and webservices.amazon.de:
{"__type":"com.amazon.paapi5#IncompleteSignatureException","Errors":[{"Code":"IncompleteSignature","Message":"The request signature did not include all of the required components. If you are using an AWS SDK, requests are signed for you automatically; otherwise, go to https://webservices.amazon.com/paapi5/documentation/sending-request.html#signing."}]}That is ordinary signature validation. It is not the documented deprecation response. Three regional hosts answered, and on 4 August they are still parsing v5 request bodies.
There is a small joke buried in the error too. It tells you to go to webservices.amazon.com/paapi5/documentation/sending-request.html, which is the documentation site that now 302s to the dateless deprecation notice. The live endpoint is handing out a link to documentation Amazon took down.
Now the limit, and it is a real one. None of that shows v5 still serves product data. I have no Associates credentials, I could not sign a real request, and Amazon may well validate the signature first and return the deprecation 403 only once a properly signed call gets that far. What is proven is narrow: the endpoints answer, and an unsigned probe comes back with a signature error rather than the documented 403. The AccessDeniedException above is still Amazon’s account of its own system, and I have not seen one land.
Ten qualifying sales, and the window rolls
Here is what actually sits between a new site and the catalog. The Creators API introduction page lists four prerequisites:
“To use the Creators API, you must:
- Be enrolled in the Amazon Associates program for your target marketplace
- Have at least 10 qualifying sales within the past 30 days to access the PA API through the Creators API
- Register for API access through Associates Central
- Generate API credentials”
the second bullet is the one that matters, and that trailing clause travels with it. Under that bar, the error codes page says you get a 403 with the reason AssociateNotEligible and the message “Your account does not currently meet the eligibility requirements.”
That same page states the rule in words the introduction does not use: “10 qualified sales in the trailing 30 days” against “10 qualifying sales within the past 30 days.” Same number, same window, three words swapped, and neither page defines any of them. The Associates glossary has entries for Amazon Qualifying Product and Third-Party Qualifying Product. It has no entry for a qualifying sale.
Note “past” and “trailing,” though. The version I keep seeing says ten sales in your first 30 days, which would be a probation window that closes on you and never reopens. A rolling window can be cleared at any point, and it can also be lost again later.
The same website still promises you a starter allowance
Amazon’s API rates page, live right now on the Creators API doc set:
“As soon as you create your Creators API credentials, you are allowed an initial usage limit up to a maximum of one request per second (one TPS) and a cumulative daily maximum of 8640 requests per day (8640 TPD) for the first 30-day period. This will help you begin your integration with the API, test it out, and start building links and referring products to your readers.”
That paragraph describes somebody who has referred nothing yet and is using the API to get going. Which is precisely the state the ten-sale rule excludes.
I pulled the archived v5 rates page to find out whether the paragraph was new. It is not. Same 8640 TPD, same one TPS, same first-30-day framing, same sentence about starting to refer products, written well before the threshold existed. The Creators API rates page is the old page with the product name substituted through it, and nobody went back over the prose.
So Amazon currently publishes both “you need ten sales to use this” and “create credentials and here is an allowance to help you start referring products.” Both are up. Neither page mentions the other.
Your old keys do not migrate, and there is no grace period
The migration guide is blunt about this. Existing AWS Access Key and Secret Key pairs “will not work with the Creators API,” and you have to register and generate new ones. Authentication moved from SigV4 to OAuth 2.0, the endpoint host changed, and the request parameters changed case. There is no dual-credential period published anywhere and no sentence saying the old keys keep working until some date.
The reason Amazon does not owe anybody a notice period is in the license itself, which reserves the right to change, deprecate or republish these APIs at any time and puts it on you to keep your integration compatible with the then-current requirements. A company holding that clause is not obliged to publish a date, and the banner history is what exercising it looks like.
(That link goes to the Program Policies, which is several separately titled documents sharing one container rather than one agreement. Section numbers restart inside each, so a clause number on its own never identifies anything.)
What this does not mean
The strong version going around is that you can no longer start an Amazon affiliate site. Amazon’s own pages do not support that, and the sentence that settles it sits on the rates page a few paragraphs below the starter allowance:
“If you lose access to Creators API, you can continue to use other product linking tools, such as Site Stripe and generate revenue.”
That is Amazon describing an associate with no API access as somebody who still builds links and still earns.
If that is the route, the clauses covering the links themselves matter more than the API ones do, and I went through the shortener and cloaking rules people quote at each other sentence by sentence.
The program entry rule points the same direction. From the Account Dormancy page: once you apply, “you have 180 days to refer a sale through one of your Associates links,” and once you have referred three qualifying sales Amazon evaluates your application. None of that needs an API. Acceptance into the program sits downstream of manual sales, and API access sits downstream of acceptance. That is an order of operations, not a lock.
(While I was on that page: the thing everybody repeats about that window, three sales in 180 days or your account gets closed, is not what it says. Amazon’s consequence sentence has no number in it. It says “not enough qualifying sales,” and what gets withdrawn is the application rather than the account.)
There is a human route as well, on the registration page. You can ask for final acceptance through the Associates Contact Us form and give details about why you need Creators API access. Whether that gets anybody past the ten-sale threshold specifically is not published and I could not establish it. It is described as a route to final acceptance in the Associates Program, which might be a different gate from the API one.
What is actually gone is narrower than the strong version, and it is still the thing that broke. Programmatic catalog access on day one no longer exists. SearchItems, GetItems, the calls a product-page generator is built on top of, all sit behind a threshold an account with no sales cannot clear. Most published guides still open at “get your API keys,” and that step is not there in the shape they describe.
Five things nobody has published
Where the ten-sale check actually fires. The registration walkthrough Amazon publishes has no eligibility step in it at all. Whether an ineligible associate sees no menu item, a button that fails, or credentials that issue cleanly and then 403 on the first call is not written down anywhere I found.
Whether ten is also the bar for keeping access. The introduction says ten. The rates page says you lose access if your account “has not generated qualified referring sales for a consecutive 30-day period,” which puts the retention bar above zero rather than at ten. An account with three sales last month passes one test and fails the other. Amazon does not reconcile them, so I am not going to pick one.
What a qualifying sale is. Undefined, in four different phrasings, across four pages. The nearest defined thing in the program documents is Qualifying Purchases in the Commission Income Statement, and that one turns on shipment rather than on the order. The two being the same thing is a reasonable guess. It is a guess.
What happens to somebody who held v5 credentials and now sits under ten sales. Nothing addresses grandfathering, in either direction.
When the ten-sale rule started. One secondhand account puts it in November 2025 and I could not corroborate that from any Amazon page or archive capture. There is no change log entry, no announcement, and no mention of the rule in the Operating Agreement or the Program Policies. It appears in API documentation prose and in an error-code table. The rule is documented. It was never announced.
