Jul 20, 2026

Fieldwire API: The Webhooks Exist, the Access Doesn't

An RFI can sit unanswered for three days even though everyone has the email. Carly closes that gap. It can chase the response, route a submittal to the right subcontractor, turn daily reports and photos into an owner update, coordinate inspections, and keep the PM’s punch-list follow-up moving. With Fieldwire API access, Carly also works from the project records and events; without it, much of the communication still runs from the connected inbox and calendar.

Fieldwire has one of the better construction APIs — 394 endpoints, full CRUD, and around 40 webhook event types — and you cannot buy access to it with a credit card.

API access appears in no published tier. Fieldwire’s pricing page lists Basic at $0, Pro at $39, Business at $64, and Business Plus at $89 per user per month, and then says separately: “Contact us to learn about unlimited user options, tailored training, dedicated success teams, API access, and single sign-on.”

So a commercial construction team paying $89 a seat still has to talk to sales. Then, once the add-on is on the account, an Account Owner or Manager clicks “Request API developer access” in Account settings — which opens a mailto to support. Two conversations, no self-serve path, and the add-on price is nowhere published.

That’s the honest headline. The capability is genuinely good; the access is the problem.

If you can’t get API access, you can still automate around it

This is the practical question for most readers, because most Fieldwire customers won’t buy the add-on for one workflow.

The useful reframe: the work you want automated doesn’t only live in Fieldwire. It lives in the email and calendar traffic around the job — and that you already control.

RFIs and submittals arrive by email. The chase, the routing to the right sub, the reminder when nobody has responded in three days — all of that runs off your inbox, not off Fieldwire’s API.
Daily reports and photos get sent, not just filed. Getting the day’s summary to the owner and the PM is an email job.
Meetings, walks, and inspections live on a calendar. Confirmations, reminders, and the follow-up afterward don’t need Fieldwire’s cooperation.
Punch list items become tasks somewhere. Wherever your team actually tracks them, that system can be driven.

So the honest position is that a sales-gated API blocks reading Fieldwire’s data, not automating your projects. If the add-on is already on your account, the event surface below is a genuinely good one to build on. If it isn’t, start from the email and calendar side, and treat the API as an upgrade rather than a prerequisite.

What’s behind the gate

Worth knowing, because if your account already has API access provisioned, this is a strong surface.

Auth is a two-token exchange. A long-lived API token from the account page gets traded for a short-lived JWT:

POST https://client-api.super.fieldwire.com/api_keys/jwt
{"api_token": "<your_refresh_token>"}

Then Authorization: Bearer <access_token> plus a required Fieldwire-Version: YYYY-MM-DD header. Access tokens live “a few minutes to a few hours,” and Fieldwire reserves the right to change that without notice — so build refresh in from the start rather than caching.

Account-level base https://client-api.super.fieldwire.com/
Project data https://client-api.us.fieldwire.com/api/v3 or the .eu. equivalent — region matters
Current version is v3.1, with date-based minor versioning

Rate limits are two-layer. A catch-all of 3,000 requests per 5 minutes, plus separate per-endpoint minute and hour windows. Both report through headers — X-RateLimit-* for the catch-all, ratelimit-limit-minute and ratelimit-limit-hour for the per-endpoint ones — and the 429 body names which window you tripped. Fieldwire’s docs explicitly say don’t hardcode the numbers.

Pagination is a sync cursor, not offsets: Fieldwire-Per-Page up to 1,000, with an X-Last-Synced-At response header fed back as ?last_synced_at=. Page-number loops don’t work.

Genuinely full CRUD

The live OpenAPI spec runs 394 paths — 243 GET, 138 POST, 91 DELETE, 88 PATCH, 63 PUT. Writable: tasks (with restore, duplicate, email, export, and batch check-items), custom task attributes, forms and form templates, markups on sheets and attachments and RFIs, sheet uploads, floorplans (including rotate, merge, and OCR), folders, attachments, and user administration.

Fieldwire’s own FAQ calls it “very mature and 100% production ready” — it powers their web and mobile apps — while also conceding it doesn’t include every product capability.

Note there are no photo endpoints. Photos are handled as attachments, despite the UI treating them as a separate tab.

Around 40 webhook events, in beta

This is the part that stings given the access gate, because it’s a good event surface.

Webhooks live on a separate host — webhook-api.us.fieldwire.com — are account-level rather than project-level, and are managed by POSTing a subscription with a name, description, target URL, and status. Optional entity and project filters narrow what fires; leaving filters blank means everything fires.

Events cover tasks, task check items, task relations, forms, markups, sheets, sheet uploads, floorplans (including merged, rescanned, and rotated), attachments, hyperlinks, entity tags and taggings, projects (including transferred), and project resource links — mostly with created, updated, deleted, and in several cases restored.

Three caveats that matter. The feature is explicitly labelled in development and subject to change. It’s absent from the OpenAPI spec entirely — documentation only, separate service. And delivery and retry semantics aren’t documented at all, so don’t assume a retry policy exists.

One specific trap Fieldwire calls out: updating a custom task attribute does not fire a task-updated event. If your automation keys on CTA changes, it will never run.

Hilti didn’t cause this

Hilti acquired Fieldwire in November 2021 for around $300 million, and it’s a reasonable guess that a hardware conglomerate introduced a partner gate. It doesn’t hold up.

The developer hub is fully public and unauthenticated — docs and the complete OpenAPI spec are fetchable with no login. Some developer-relations plumbing now runs on Hilti infrastructure, but developers.fieldwire.com remains canonical. The sales gate is framed as a subscription add-on, not a partner program, and predates the current setup.

Five things that will cost you a day

“Categories” in the UI are teams in the API. Fieldwire’s own FAQ calls this “a small discrepancy.” Tasks return a team_id; you resolve names through /teams. Anyone mapping UI categories directly will fail silently.
Plan upload is a three-step S3 dance. Generate an AWS POST token, PUT the file to Fieldwire’s S3 bucket, then create a sheet upload with the returned URL. The docs warn that parameter order from the token response must be preserved, the literal ${filename} placeholder must be kept and then hand-substituted, nothing may be URL-encoded, and an empty 204 from AWS means success. Adding a version to an existing plan is a different call entirely — a PATCH on the floorplan.
Unpopulated custom task attributes are absent from responses, not null. List-type values come back as UUIDs needing a second lookup. And setting a value the first time requires POST; only afterward does PATCH work.
Omitting Fieldwire-Version auto-tracks latest, which will break you on the next backwards-incompatible release. Pin a date.
There’s no Zapier app. The listing 404s, confirmed against working controls. No middleware shortcut exists.

Fieldwire’s AI is beta too

Fieldwire markets Field Intelligence — asking questions across plans, tasks, photos and forms; voice-driven task creation; AI-assisted RFI editing; converting form issues into tasks. Every feature on that page routes to a beta signup. Nothing is marked generally available, and no AI capability is exposed through the API — the 394-path spec contains no inference endpoints. The only ML-adjacent one is floorplan OCR.

If you already have access

Assuming the add-on is on your account, the event surface is the interesting part. A task created, a form submitted, a markup added on a sheet — these are the moments where a superintendent’s follow-up either happens or gets lost until the next walk.

Handing that to an AI assistant hits a specific limit.

Both ChatGPT and Claude will now do work on a schedule, unattended. Neither reacts to events. A task that runs hourly still finds out an hour late, and one that runs each morning finds out tomorrow — the trigger is the clock, never the thing you actually care about.

“Summarize open tasks by trade” is well within what ChatGPT or Claude will do with a Fieldwire export. “Notify the sub and open the RFI the moment a task is flagged” is not, because nothing on that side is listening for the flag.

Carly sits on that side:

Fires on the Fieldwire event — task created, form submitted, markup added
Runs the whole response in one flow — read the task, identify the assignee and project, draft the message, send it, log it
Actually sends — Gmail and Outlook, with attachments
Absorbs the token churn — a JWT that expires in minutes, on a TTL Fieldwire can change without notice, is exactly the plumbing worth not maintaining yourself

If your Fieldwire account has API access provisioned, you can connect it natively to Carly from the Integrations tab with your API key. If it doesn’t, the blocker is Fieldwire’s sales gate rather than anything on the automation side — and that’s worth raising with your account team before scoping any integration work. Once connected, Carly can use Fieldwire in on-demand, recurring, and event-triggered workflows. AI agents start at $35/month, and workflow steps that don’t use AI run free.

Frequently Asked Questions

Which Fieldwire plan includes API access?

None of the published ones. Basic, Pro, Business, and Business Plus don’t include it — Fieldwire’s pricing page directs you to contact sales for API access alongside SSO and unlimited users. “App integrations” on Business tiers means prebuilt connectors like Power BI, not API credentials.

How do I get a Fieldwire API key?

API access has to be purchased on the account first. Then an Account Owner or Manager goes to Account → API Settings and clicks “Request API developer access,” which emails Fieldwire support. Once granted, the link becomes “Manage tokens.”

Does Fieldwire have webhooks?

Yes, roughly 40 event types across tasks, forms, markups, sheets, floorplans, attachments, projects, and tags. They’re in beta, run on a separate host from the main API, and aren’t in the OpenAPI spec. Delivery and retry semantics aren’t documented. Note that custom task attribute updates don’t fire task-updated events.

Did Hilti’s acquisition restrict the Fieldwire API?

No. The developer documentation and full OpenAPI spec remain public and unauthenticated. The sales gate on API access is a subscription add-on rather than a partner program, and isn’t attributable to the acquisition.

Does Fieldwire work with Zapier?

No. The Zapier listing returns a 404, verified against working control listings. There’s no middleware path around the API access requirement.

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