I'm trying to wrap my head around how Anthropic bills for the Claude API. Their pricing seems straightforward at first glance:

• X $ per million input tokens

• Y $ per million output tokens

But I'm not quite sure how this translates to actual billing. Does Anthropic:

1. Add up all input tokens across all API calls separately?

2. Add up all output tokens across all API calls separately?

3. Then charge based on these total counts?

Or is there more to it that I'm missing?

Question in the title... With Gemini already at a 90% cheaper than Anthropic, and now Deepseek following suit. How will users be able to justify the Claude API price?

I built out all my AI features of my software to use Anthropic, but now given the context size I'm producing and what I expect users to produce in terms of context size, it becomes harder and harder for me to justify the Anthropic price.

Have they released any news recently on breakthrough? potentially making Sonnet more affordable?

I need to share my incredibly frustrating experience with Claude AI subscription. Due to their system failing auto-renewal, I had to manually renew monthly. This time, the renewal page unexpectedly defaulted to the ANNUAL plan ($250) without clear notice before I clicked renew. I saw the amount too late as the charge went through.

I contacted support immediately to correct this mistake. Got an auto-reply promising a human follow-up, but then heard nothing for over a week, despite chasing.

Forced to dispute the charge with my bank, Anthropic then apparently told my bank the issue was RESOLVED BY SPEAKING TO ME. This is completely FALSE. I have had zero communication from a human at Anthropic regarding this issue.

My subscription is now revoked, and Anthropic seems content keeping the $250 for an annual plan I never intended to buy and immediately tried to cancel. This feels incredibly deceptive, from the UI potentially being a dark pattern to the blatant misrepresentation to my bank. Absolutely unacceptable customer service and business practice. Be very careful with their subscription process.

tl;dr: I am looking for an API that tells me how much credit I have with Anthropic but cannot find one. And I have some questions.. :)

Hi, all. I hope you are having a great day.

I've been using Anthropic APIs for my side project, which so far has been fun.

For an admin dashboard, I am looking for an API to show how much credit I have left with Anthropic, and to my surprise, I cannot find it in the official documentation.

Upon inspecting network calls when visiting Anthropic Console page, I can see that they already have an internal endpoint, which is https://console.anthropic.com/api/organizations/{org-id}/prepaid/credits ( I haven't tried hitting it from my app, but I image they have CORS enabled ).

I also see a few other existing (internal) endpoints that seem to be useful [0] to make public and also bake into client SDK, such as /invoice_balance*,* /invoices*,* and /current_spend. And the below are my questions

1. If billing APIs already exist and I missed, I am terribly sorry. Can someone kindly point me to relevant doc(s) please?

2. Does anyone know if Anthropic plans to release "billing APIs"?

3. Is there a process to request APIs, and perhaps we can vote candidate APIs as a community?

I searched this community first and failed to find a similar question, so I decided to post.

Thanks everyone!

Warm regards

[0] With billing APIs, a few example use cases I can see are

1. dynamically change AI model depending on the remaining balance

2. set alerts based on current usage / remaining balance / invoice

3. maybe, if an app were to be powered by donation, you could show the current credit when asking for donations?

I added extra credit to my account 10 days ago so I could continue to use the API, got an email receipt, the credit shows in my account, but I keep getting a message from typingmind, etc, that I don't have any credit. I've reached out to customer support at Anthropic several times, via the web chat, email and Twitter, and nobody has replied in ten days. Anyone else having issues like these?

I'm new to Claude and I use AI for personal daily tasks, maybe 20-30 times per day when I use it. I don't want to pay $20 a month because I don't to get into yet another recurring subscription.

I got the free $5 credit for the API version to try Opus and I'd be happy using it via that interface.

Would it make more sense for me to just add credit to the plan of the API version when I need to?

I just paid for the Pro version of Claude. Downloaded Cursor and when I went to add the 'API key', it seems like I also need to pay for Anthropic?

I am a little confused. First time doing the Cursor IDE setup. I am a Rider dev.

I want to be able to use Cursor without any limitations. Not bragging but money is not a concern. I make enough as a Software Consultant to afford those memberships.

Also, I heard about bolt.new or something along those lines? I checked it out but it seems towards opinionated out-of-the-box frontend applications.

Any advice?

Thanks!!!

Hi, I am completely new to Anthropic API.

I am trying a few prompts using https://github.com/Doriandarko/claude-engineer/ to build a simple reactJs web app with Sonnet 3.5 model using API. and I notice the credits go down really fast.

What are some general tips to save money for development?

Hi, I'm new to Claude (and LLMs in general) and I don't quite understand the pricing. My goal is to use Claude paired with the aider tool.

For example, Claude's Haiku model costs: $0.25 / MTok (Input) $1.25 / MTok (Output) (https://www.anthropic.com/pricing#anthropic-api)

Does this mean that I get charged $0.25 for every million tokens I send (million words I assume?) and $1.25 for every million tokens I receive? That seems like a lot of tokens for very little money. Is this a monthly charge? Am I overestimating the amount of data that I can send/recieve?

Hi I dont get why API usage (like for Claude Code) has to be prepaid while we have a pro account that could offer this service, even with limitations.

Can someone explain this to me ?

Including api usage in Claude pro would give Anthropic new pro plan subscribers like me

Well, at least for the power users who run into usage limits regularly–which seems to pretty much be everyone. I'm working on an iterative project right now that requires 3.5 Sonnet to churn out ~20000 tokens of code for each attempt at a new iteration. This has to get split up across several responses, with each one getting cut off at around 3100-3300 output tokens. This means that when the context window is approaching 200k, which is pretty often, my requests would be costing me ~$0.65 each if I had done them through the API. I can probably get in about 15 of these high token-count prompts before running into usage limits, and most days I'm able to run out my limit twice, but sometimes three times if my messages replenish at a convenient hour.

So being conservative, let's say 30 prompts * $0.65 = $19.50... which means my usage in just a single day might've cost me nearly as much via API as I'd spent for the entire month of Claude Pro. Of course, not every prompt will be near the 200k context limit so the figure may be a bit exaggerated, and we don't know how much the API costs Anthropic to run, but it's clear to me that Pro users are being showered with what seems like an economically implausible amount of (potential) value for $20. I can't even imagine how much it was costing them back when Opus was the big dog. Bizarrely, the usage limits actually felt much higher back then somehow. So how in the hell are they affording this, and how long can they keep it up, especially while also allowing 3.5 Sonnet usage to free users now too? There's a part of me that gets this sinking feeling knowing the honeymoon phase with these AI companies has to end and no tech startup escapes the scourge of Netflix-ification, where after capturing the market they transform from the friendly neighborhood tech bros with all the freebies into kafkaesque rentier bullies, demanding more and more while only ever seeming to provide less and less in return, keeping us in constant fear of the next shakedown, etc etc... but hey at least Anthropic is painting itself as the not-so-evil techbro alternative so that's a plus. Is this just going to last until the sweet VC nectar dries up? Or could it be that the API is what's really overpriced, and the volume they get from enterprise clients brings in a big enough margin to subsidize the Pro subscriptions–in which case, the whole claude.ai website would basically just be functioning as an advertisement/demo of sorts to reel in API clients and stay relevant with the public? Any thoughts?

Heads-up for any EU businesses thinking of using Anthropic.

I subscribed to Claude Pro on April 17th, 2025, entered my company billing details before checkout, but they issued the invoice under my personal name, making it invalid under local tax law.

I contacted support, but the first response was from their AI Bot, Fin, just telling me “we can’t modify API invoices.” No human help. It didn't even get the product right (which was stated in my original email). Eventually they offered a refund - but support is so slow and unresponsive that weeks have passed with no resolution. I’ve since messaged their sales department, which directed me to the support page (sigh) and filed a BBB complaint.

Meanwhile, this invalid invoice leaves me unable to register the expense, and could trigger a tax compliance audit if submitted. Awesome, right?

I'd like to warn all EU businesses: Anthropic’s billing system and support aren’t ready for international business compliance. If they are, they are doing a bad job at it. And if something goes wrong, don’t expect fast help.

Hello, I added $50 to the Anthropic Console to try out the API and Workbench. However, I could not find any invoice section where I can download the invoice for billing purpose. Has anyone experienced the same, and what did you do to get the invoice?

Thank you.

$1.67 in Anthropic API costs per hour of coding in Zed with Sonnet 4 Thinking so far. Not too shabby imho. What do you guys get?

I wanted to be smart and save some money and also pay the company that runs the show.

Instead, I fucked up and went with Anthropic.

Now I'm sitting here for the next 5 hours thinking about how to shitpost about it.

These rate limits are dogshit and they should feel bad.

Created the below guide that hopefully will assist those who are interested in trying it out - especially those who are frustrated with the paid Anthropic monthly subscription:

What is an API?

API stands for Application Programming Interface. It's a software intermediary that allows two applications to communicate with each other. Think of it as a messenger that takes your request to a provider and delivers the response back to you. In simpler terms, an API is a set of rules and specifications that allows different software applications to interact and share data, regardless of their underlying technologies.

How to Obtain an Anthropic API Key

Here's a detailed guide to getting your Anthropic API key:

1. Create an Anthropic Account:

   • Go to the Anthropic website (console.anthropic.com) and sign up for an account or log in if you already have one.

2. Access the API Keys Section:

   • Once you're logged into your account, navigate to your name/profile icon at the top right of your screen. Look for an option labeled "API Keys".

3. Generate a New API Key:

   • Click on the button "+ Create Key".

   • You'll be prompted to give your key a name. Enter a name and click "Create Key."

4. Copy and Secure Your API Key:

   • A long string will be displayed, which is your API key. Copy this key immediately and store it in a safe location. You will not be able to view it again, and you'll need to generate a new one if you lose it.

5. Set up Billing:

   • I put daily limits on usage – just in case. I recommend you do the same.

Important notes:

• Security: Treat your API key like a password. Do not share it publicly or embed it directly in your code (if applicable). Use secure methods to store and access it.

• You can always disable your key and create new ones if you feel any have been compromised.

API Limits - Quick Definitions:

• Rate (Requests Per Minute - RPM): How often you can send requests (Low to Higher).

• Context (Max Input Tokens): How much the AI remembers (Smaller to Larger).

• Output (Max Output Tokens): How long the AI's response can be (Shorter to Longer).

Anthropic Tiers:

• Tier 1:

  • Very low rate limits (50 RPM).

  • Small per minute context input limit (40k-50K input tokens on 3.5 models). This is the real killer for single users.

  • Shorter responses/output (per min).

  • This tier will make you tear your wig off - avoid.

• Tier 2

  • Higher rate limits (1000 RPM).

  • Moderate per minute context input limit (80k-100k input tokens on 3.5 models).

  • Longer responses/output (per min).

  • I recommend spending the $40 to get to this at least. The majority of users will probably use up their $40 within 3-6 months. Just a guess on my part FYI. Power users can gobble this up in no time, however.

• Tier 3:

  • Higher rate limits (2000 RPM).

  • Large per minute context input limit (160k-200k input tokens on 3.5 models).

  • Longer responses/output (per min).

• Tier 4:

  • Highest rate limits (4,000 RPM), which means it can handle more concurrent requests.

  • Very large per minute context input limit (up to 400k input tokens on all models).

  • Longer responses/output (per min).

  • Currently this is the only tier that allows for 3.5 Sonnet's max context window of 200k input tokens (check my hyper link above to see for yourself).

  • You'll need $400 currently to reach this tier.

WARNING - YOUR API CREDITS EXPIRE AFTER 12 MONTHS FROM PURCHASE.

Anthropic Current Models & Context:

• Claude 3 Opus:

  • Has a max context window of 200k input tokens. 4K max output tokens.

  • Available on all tiers.

• Claude 3.5 Sonnet:

  • Has a max context window of 200k input tokens. 8K max output tokens.

  • Available on all tiers.

• Claude 3.5 Haiku:

  • Has a max context window of 200k input tokens. 8K max output tokens.

  • Available on all tiers.

Tier 4 Advantages for Multiple Users:

Tier 4's primary benefit is its high rate limits, allowing for a total of 400,000 input tokens per minute. This capacity means you could, for example, concurrently run multiple 200,000 input token context models at their maximum. This level of throughput is particularly important for applications that experience a high volume of requests.

Why Tier 4 Matters for High Traffic:

• Handles Concurrent Requests: Tier 4 is designed to efficiently manage simultaneous requests from many users.

• Prevents Overloads: Lower tiers can become overwhelmed with a large number of users submitting queries, causing slowdowns. Tier 4 prevents these bottlenecks, ensuring smooth operation.

• Supports Sustained High Usage: Tier 4 is ideal for applications requiring consistent support for heavy request loads.

Tier 4 for the Single User:

As a single, "power" user, Tier 4 essentially removes all limitations on your usage.

To clarify - Tier 4 allows up to 400k input tokens of TOTAL context per minute. It does NOT allow for any particular model to extend its context input token window capability.

Platforms for Using Anthropic API Keys

Here are some popular platforms, categorized by their nature:

Free Platforms (just a sample of some I use):

• Anthropic Console Workbench: The Anthropic website itself provides a Workbench where you can experiment with the API directly in your browser. This is a good place to start exploring.

• TypingMind (Limited): Decent number of features for free - but ads are annoying. Check it out. Free is browser based only I believe.

• ChatBox (Community Edition): The commercial product is also free and easy to install locally - however read the privacy policy and be sure you are good with it (I'm serious). They have a browser based one here (again, read privacy policy): Chatbox.

• Msty (Limited): Good free feature set. Nice UI.

Paid Platforms (just a sample of some I use):

• TypingMind (Full Featured/Lifetime purchase): Onetime payment (try to catch it on sale sub $100) and also has a local install option if you are tech savvy enough. The unique thing about this is that you can utilize things like "Canvas" across multiple API vendors (Anthropic for example).

• 16x Prompt: I use this for coding heavily. Check it out.

• Msty (Lifetime): I have not used this, but I have a friend who loves the additional features that the paid version brings.

Open-Source Platforms (just a sample of some I use):

• Open WebUI: An open-source platform for building AI agents and workflows that supports various model providers, including Claude. Install with pinokio - far easier to get you set up on it if you are unfamiliar with Docker.

• LibreChat (Advanced Setup): No pinokio installation method as of yet but another incredibly featured free open-sourced product that just released Agents as well. They also released a code interpreter feature that is not free - however if you have a need for something like this you'd understand why (sandboxed environment).

Plenty of vendor options out there I'm sure - just be sure your keys are stored securely and be sure to actually read the Privacy Policy with all of them (I can't stress this enough).

WARNING: This is NOT a thread for devs to blatantly promote their product. I am not associated with ANY of the above recommendations. I have contributed to the Open WebUI platform by creating some popular functions - but that is about it.

Hope this helps!

Edit: Modified some things. Removed my statement regarding my preference for keys not being stored in browsers - again, generally a non-issue for most. Unique issue just for me.

Anyone know why the continue button greyed out? I tried create api key for my personal use and tried to upgrade it, but somehow the continue button greyed out eventhough i put all the information.