How to Get a Claude API Key and Pay for It: Credits, Limits and Costs
Your Claude subscription doesn't cover the API, and the API has its own account, its own credit and its own limits. Here's how to get set up without surprises.
Short answer: sign up at the Claude Console, buy prepaid credits on its Billing page, and create a key under API keys. You then pay per token: per 1M input and output tokens, Claude Haiku 5.5 costs $0.10 / $0.50, Claude Sonnet 5.5 $2.00 / $10.00 and Claude Opus 5.5 $4.00 / $20.00. A Claude Pro subscription doesn't include API use, but Max and Ultra come with $100 and $200 a month of API credit.
Claude subscription or Claude API?
They're separate products with separate bills. A Claude plan (Free, Pro, Max or Ultra) covers the Claude apps and Claude Code, within usage limits. The Claude API is for your own code and tools: you call the models with a key and pay for every token. Anthropic's help centre says it plainly: a paid plan "enhances your chat experience, and the Claude API is billed separately."
You need the API when you're building an app, running automations, or using a tool that asks for an API key. If you only want Claude Code for your own coding, check our Claude Code plans page first: it sets each plan against the API cost of the same work.
How to get a Claude API key, step by step
- Create a Console account at platform.claude.com. It's a separate account from your claude.ai plan.
- Add credit. On the Billing page, choose "Buy credits", enter an amount and pay by card. The credit is available straight away. Anthropic says new users get "a small amount of free credits to test the API", but expect to add your own soon.
- Create a key under API keys and keep it somewhere safe, such as a password manager. Anyone who has the key can spend your credit.
- Use it. Anthropic's software development kits read the key from an environment variable called
ANTHROPIC_API_KEY. Tools such as OpenClaw and Hermes Agent ask for it during setup. - Set a spend limit on the Billing page before you connect an agent, so a runaway loop can't drain your balance.
How Claude API credits work
- Prepaid. Most accounts pay in advance. When the balance runs out, API calls stop until you add more.
- Auto-reload. You can top up automatically whenever the balance falls below a level you set.
- Credits expire one year after purchase, and purchases can't be refunded, so don't buy a year's worth up front.
- You pay for successful calls only. Failed requests aren't charged. A request that would have succeeded is still charged if your app disconnects or times out partway through.
- What credits cover: API calls, the Console's playground, and Claude Code when it runs on an API key.
- Invoices instead of prepaid credit are available to larger customers through Anthropic's sales team, billed monthly at the same prices.
Claude API limits: the spend caps on new accounts
Anthropic puts each organisation on a usage tier. New accounts often start on an evaluation tier and move up automatically as they build a usage history. Each tier caps what you can spend in a month:
| Tier | Monthly spend cap |
|---|---|
| Start | $500 |
| Build | $1,000 |
| Scale | $200,000 |
| Custom | Arranged with Anthropic |
From Anthropic's rate limits page, read 8 November 2026. Each tier also sets how many requests and tokens you can send per minute.
If you hit your tier's cap, API calls pause until the first of the next month (UTC). To raise it, use "Request tier increase" on the Console's rate limits page. You can also set a lower limit of your own, and give each workspace its own monthly cap and alerts (except the default workspace).
Do Claude Max and Ultra include API credits?
Yes. Since October 2026, some Claude plans come with monthly API credit:
- Max ($100 a month): $100 of API credit.
- Ultra ($200 a month): $200.
- Team: $20 per Standard seat and $100 per Premium seat, pooled and capped at $500.
- Free, Pro and Enterprise plans don't get any.
To claim it, go to Settings, then Billing on claude.ai, and choose "Link organization" under API credits. You need to have been on the plan for seven days. The plan credit is spent before any credit you've bought, and whatever is unused expires at the end of each billing cycle.
It covers the Messages and Batches APIs, the playground, Claude Managed Agents and the Claude Agent SDK. It doesn't cover interactive Claude Code in the terminal, an IDE or the desktop app, extra usage on your plan, or Claude bought through Amazon Bedrock, Google Cloud or Microsoft Foundry.
How much the Claude API costs per month
A chatbot or assistant handling about 50 conversations a day sends roughly 9M input and 1.2M output tokens a month. At list prices:
| Model | Input / output per 1M | Per month |
|---|---|---|
| Claude Haiku 5.5 | $0.10 / $0.50 | $1.50 |
| Claude Sonnet 5.5 | $2.00 / $10.00 | $30.00 |
| Claude Opus 5.5 | $4.00 / $20.00 | $60.00 |
| Claude Fable 5.2 | $8.00 / $40.00 | $120 |
9M input and 1.2M output tokens a month. Prices checked 11 Nov 2026; this table updates automatically.
Two discounts change these numbers a lot:
- Prompt caching. Repeated input, such as a long system prompt, is billed at a fraction of the input price:
| Model | Input | Cached input | Saving on cached tokens |
|---|---|---|---|
| Claude Haiku 5.5 | $0.10 | $0.010 | 90% |
| Claude Sonnet 5.5 | $2.00 | $0.10 | 95% |
| Claude Opus 5.5 | $4.00 | $0.20 | 95% |
| Claude Fable 5.2 | $8.00 | $0.20 | 98% |
Per 1M tokens. Checked 11 Nov 2026; this table updates automatically.
- Batch processing halves both input and output prices for work that doesn't need an instant answer.
Two things raise them. Claude Haiku 5.5's price rises fivefold for prompts over 100,000 tokens, and requests pinned to US-only processing cost 1.1 times the standard rate. Coding agents also use far more tokens than chat: see what an AI agent costs per task. Our Anthropic pricing page lists every current and older Claude model.
Other ways to pay for Claude
- Through a cloud platform. Claude is sold on Amazon Bedrock, Google Cloud and Microsoft Foundry and billed to your cloud account. That suits companies with cloud commitments to spend; see how cloud pricing compares.
- Keys from marketplaces. Anthropic's billing pages describe only the Console, invoicing through its sales team, and the cloud platforms. A key bought anywhere else belongs to someone else's account, and its owner can revoke it at any time. We'd avoid them.
Getting a key from OpenAI, Google and others works much the same way. How to get your first AI API key covers each one, and free AI APIs lists the providers that let you start without paying.
Questions
Is the Claude API free?
No. New Console accounts get a small amount of free credit for testing, and after that you pay per token in advance. The cheapest current model, Claude Haiku 5.5, costs $0.10 / $0.50 per 1M input and output tokens.
Does Claude Pro include API access?
No. Pro covers the Claude apps and Claude Code within its usage limits, but not the API. Max and Ultra include $100 and $200 a month of API credit.
Do I need an API key to use Claude Code?
No. Claude Code comes with the Pro, Max and Ultra plans, so you can sign in with your plan and work within its limits. An API key is the other option: you pay per token, with no plan limits.
Do Claude API credits expire?
Yes. Credits you buy expire one year after purchase. The monthly credit that comes with Max, Ultra and Team expires at the end of each billing cycle.
What happens when my credit runs out?
API calls stop until you add more, unless auto-reload is on. Reaching your tier's monthly spend cap also pauses calls until the first of the next month, unless Anthropic moves you to a higher tier.
Sources: Anthropic's pricing and rate limits pages, and the Claude Help Center articles on paying for API usage and monthly API credits for Max, Ultra and Team plans. Read 8 November 2026. Prices in the tables update automatically.