Use your own Anthropic key in Leefy

Why would I use my own Anthropic key?

Every AI action in Leefy — improve, grow, synthesize, prune, produce, coach — costs money at the model provider. By default Leefy pays that bill and takes Leefy credits off your balance. Connect your own Anthropic key instead and those actions run on your Anthropic account: no Leefy credits are spent on that provider at all, and you pay Anthropic directly at Anthropic's own rates with nothing added on top.

Worth doing if you already have an Anthropic account, if you'd rather have all your AI spend on one bill, or if you plan to use Leefy heavily. Entirely optional — Leefy credits work with no setup, and you can remove your key later without breaking anything.

About ten minutes. No developer, no terminal.

What do I need before I start?

• An email address you can check now, and a phone that can receive a text. Anthropic may ask you to verify a number once.
• A payment card. This is the step people skip, and it is why most keys don't work. An Anthropic key with no credit behind it is refused on its very first request — including the check Leefy runs the moment you paste it in. The key looks completely valid. It simply cannot buy anything.
• A browser signed in as you. Locked-down company accounts sometimes can't create API keys at all.

One thing to be clear about before you spend money: a Claude.ai subscription is not API billing. Claude Pro and Claude Max pay for the Claude chat app. The API — which is what Leefy uses — has a separate balance that your subscription never touches. Paying for one gives you nothing on the other. This single misunderstanding is behind most "but I already pay Anthropic" reports.

How do I create an Anthropic account?

If you already have an Anthropic Console account, skip to billing.

1. Open the Anthropic Console: console.anthropic.com.
2. Sign up with your email address, or with Google. If you already use Claude.ai, the same login usually works — the Console is a different product, but it shares your account.
3. Confirm the email Anthropic sends you.
4. Verify a phone number if asked. Anthropic asks once, and it has to happen before you can create a key.
5. Name your organisation if prompted. If it's just you, your own name or your company name is fine — it only appears on invoices, and you can change it later.

You're in the right place when you can see a Console dashboard with a left-hand menu containing Dashboard, Workbench and Settings.

How do I add billing before the key will work?

Do this before you create the key. A new Anthropic organisation starts at a zero balance, and a key on a zero balance fails every request.

1. Open console.anthropic.com/settings/billing, or click Settings in the left menu and then the billing section.
2. Add a payment card.
3. Buy an opening amount of API credit. Anthropic sells credit up front and you choose the amount — a small first purchase is plenty to prove Leefy works, and you can top up whenever you like.
4. Set a monthly spend limit while you're on this page. Strongly recommended: it puts a hard ceiling on the worst case, which is exactly the reassurance most people want before attaching a card to a piece of software.
5. Optionally turn on auto-reload, so your balance tops itself up rather than running dry mid-session.

You're done when the billing page shows a credit balance above zero and a payment method on file. If it shows zero, or no payment method, stop here — nothing below works until that's sorted.

How do I create the API key?

1. Open console.anthropic.com/settings/keys, or find API keys under Settings.
2. Create a key.
3. Leave the workspace on the default unless you've deliberately set up others. Keys belong to one workspace and spend that workspace's budget, so a key in the wrong workspace can fail even when your main balance is healthy.
4. Name it Leefy. The name is only for you — but it's what lets you see, on Anthropic's usage page, exactly what Leefy costs versus anything else you connect. Six months from now you will be glad it isn't called "key 2".
5. Copy it now. Anthropic shows the full key exactly once, on this screen. Close the dialog and it is gone permanently — there is no "show it again". That's deliberate on Anthropic's part and it isn't a problem: if you lose a key you delete it and make another. Nothing else breaks.
6. Store it somewhere safe for the next two minutes — a password manager is ideal. Don't email it to yourself, and don't paste it into a shared document.

An Anthropic key starts with sk-ant- followed by a long string. If what you copied doesn't start with sk-ant-, you've copied the wrong thing.

If the Console offers you an Admin key, that is not the one you want. Admin keys manage the organisation; they can't generate text, and Leefy will reject one.

How do I connect the key in Leefy?

1. Open Settings in Leefy — in the More menu, and in the command palette under "Settings — AI provider & keys".
2. Under AI provider, select Anthropic (Claude). This matters more than it looks. The provider picker decides which key gets used. An Anthropic key saved while OpenAI is selected sits there doing nothing while your Leefy credits carry on being spent.
3. Paste the key into the Anthropic field.
4. Save.

Leefy checks the key with Anthropic before storing anything — a single one-token request, costing a fraction of a cent on your account. If Anthropic accepts it, Leefy encrypts the key and saves it. If Anthropic refuses, nothing is stored at all and you'll be told which of the two things went wrong.

How do I know it worked?

• The Anthropic row in Settings shows the last four characters of your key and a Validated state.
• Run any AI action on a node — Improve is the fastest.
• Your Leefy credit balance doesn't move. That's the real proof: with your own key connected, Anthropic actions don't debit credits at all.
• Within a few minutes, the usage page in the Anthropic Console shows activity against the key you named Leefy.

If credits are still being spent, your key isn't being used — check step 2 above, because the provider picker is almost certainly set to the other provider.

Why was my key rejected?

If Leefy said Anthropic rejected the key, Anthropic actively refused it. That's a key problem, not a money problem.

If none of those obviously apply, create a brand-new key and try that first. It takes thirty seconds and resolves most cases without any diagnosis at all.

Why could Leefy not verify my key?

If Leefy said it couldn't verify the key, that's a different thing: Anthropic didn't say no, it said something Leefy couldn't read as a yes. In practice this is almost always billing.

Most of the time this message means "add credit at Anthropic", not "your key is wrong". Check the balance before you create another key.

Is my key safe in Leefy?

Exactly what happens to the key you paste, so you can judge for yourself rather than take our word for it:

• It travels to Leefy's server over HTTPS and is never stored in your browser.
• Before anything is saved, Leefy tries it once against Anthropic. A key that doesn't work is never stored at all.
• It is then encrypted with AES-256-GCM on the server. Only the encrypted form reaches Leefy's database. The plain key is never written to the database, never written to logs, and never included in analytics or error reports.
• Leefy keeps the last four characters as a display hint, plus the time it was checked. Nothing else about the key is readable.
• It is decrypted only in the moment one of your own server-side AI actions needs it. It is never sent back to a browser, including yours: once saved, no screen in Leefy can show it to you again.
• Every AI call Leefy makes runs on the server. Your key never touches anyone's browser.

If that still isn't enough assurance for a key with a card behind it, the strongest control isn't ours — it's Anthropic's spend limit. Set one, and the worst possible case has a number on it.

How do I rotate or remove the key?

To remove it: open Settings in Leefy, find the Anthropic row, and delete the key. It's removed immediately. Anthropic actions go back to spending Leefy credits, and nothing else about your tree changes.

To rotate it: create a new key in the Anthropic Console, paste it into the same field in Leefy, and save — it replaces the old one. Then delete the old key in the Console. In that order, you're never left without a working key.

If you think a key has leaked: delete it in the Anthropic Console first — that's the step that actually stops the spending. Removing it from Leefy alone does not revoke it at Anthropic. Then remove it in Leefy, then create a replacement.

Rotating on a schedule is good practice but isn't required. Once or twice a year, and any time someone leaves your team, is a sensible rhythm.

Is this problem Leefy or Anthropic?

Leefy's error messages are written to tell you which side broke:

The quickest self-test: remove your key and try the action again. If it now works, the key was the problem. If it fails either way, it isn't your key — open Help & support in Leefy and tell us what you saw.

What if the Anthropic console looks different from this guide?

It will, eventually — Anthropic redesigns the Console regularly and buttons move. This guide is written to survive that:

• Trust the addresses over the labels. The links above are the stable part. If a menu item has been renamed, going straight to the URL usually still lands you in the right place.
• Trust the goal over the wording. There are only three things you need, whatever the buttons are called: a payment method with credit on it, a key, and a copy of that key.
• The order never changes. Billing before key. Key before Leefy.

Check the "last updated" date at the top of this page — if it's old and the screens look nothing like this, trust your eyes over the text. And please tell us: open Help & support in Leefy, say which step is wrong and what you actually saw. Runbooks are part of the product here, and a stale one is a bug.