You built a workflow worth sharing — and it works perfectly. Until someone else imports it.
The bottleneck is the API key. Use yours, and every user is billed against your account. Use theirs, and they each have to find the credential UI, paste their key, and reconnect every time. Both are friction. The cleaner option is to let the workflow ask for the key on the form, then thread it through to the HTTP nodes that need it. It's simpler than it sounds.
This post walks through the pattern with a working credential setup, an alternative for single-node simple cases, the gotchas, and a note on what this enables for custom node authors.
The screenshots below come from n8n's built-in Bearer Auth credential and from the n8n-nodes-ldxhub package's own credential schema. The technique itself is generic — what's shown here works for any HTTP-node workflow and any custom node that supports expression-mode credentials.
The form asks, the credential listens
