How to get a Claude API key

A Claude API key lets an app call Anthropic's Claude models (Opus, Sonnet and Haiku) on your own account. You pay Anthropic per token at its API price, and the app adds no markup. It is not the same as a claude.ai chat subscription: the key lives in the Claude Console at platform.claude.com, Anthropic's developer platform.

What you need

• A Claude Console account.
• A payment method and some credit on the Console's Billing page. API usage is charged against that balance.
• Two minutes.

Step by step

1. Sign in to the Claude Console at platform.claude.com, or create an account.
2. Add credits. Open Settings → Billing, add a card and buy a small amount of credit to start. The same page shows your monthly spend limit.
3. Open the API keys page at platform.claude.com/settings/keys and click Create key.
4. Name the key after the app you will use it in (for example "TypingMind laptop"), pick an expiration, and set Linked account to yourself. A personal key is right for your own use; service account keys are for shared workloads.
5. Copy the key. It starts with sk-ant- and the Console shows it only once. If you lose it, create a new one.
6. Paste it into the app, usually under Settings → Models or Providers → Anthropic (sometimes labelled "Claude").

What it costs

You pay per million tokens (roughly 750,000 words) read and written. Anthropic's prices on 2026-10-23:

Model	Input, per 1M tokens	Output, per 1M tokens
Claude Opus 5.5	$4	$20
Claude Sonnet 5.5	$2	$10
Claude Haiku 5.5	$0.10	$0.50 (prompts up to 100K tokens)

A typical chat turn, with some earlier conversation sent along, might be 2,000 tokens in and 500 out. With Sonnet that is about $0.009, so $5 of credit covers roughly 550 such turns; with Haiku it is under a twentieth of a cent. Long conversations cost more because apps resend the history with every message. The Batch API halves the price for jobs that don't need an instant answer.

If you already pay for Claude Max, check your plan: Anthropic includes monthly API credits ($100 on Max 5x, $200 on Max 20x).

Keep the key and the bill under control

• One key per app. Name it after the app, so you can revoke a single key without breaking the others.
• Set an expiration when you create the key, and delete keys you no longer use.
• Use workspaces to separate apps or projects; the Console lets you control spend per workspace.
• Watch your limits. Each usage tier has a monthly spend limit and per-minute rate limits; you'll find them on the Console's Rate limits and Billing pages.
• Prefer apps that keep the key on your device. Desktop apps and many browser extensions send it straight to Anthropic. If an app stores your key on its servers, it should say how it is protected.