About two minutes
Why you bring your own key.
Because the alternative is worse for both of us: I would have to hold a shared key, meter it, and price it — and you would pay a margin on top of what the model already costs.
Getting one
- 01
Make an Anthropic account
console.anthropic.com. An email address and a password; no card needed to create it.
- 02
Add a little credit
Billing, then add five dollars. That is enough for roughly sixty generations at the sizes this tool produces, and it does not auto-renew unless you ask it to.
- 03
Create a key
API keys, then create. Copy it once — the console will not show it to you again. It begins sk-ant-.
- 04
Paste it into the forge
It lives in that browser tab and nowhere else. Close the tab and it is gone unless you ticked the box to keep it for the session.
Where the key actually goes
- Into a React state variable in your browser tab.
- Into sessionStorage, only if you tick the box. That dies when the tab closes — deliberately, rather than surviving for months on a shared machine.
- Into one request header, sent directly from your browser to api.anthropic.com.
It is never sent to Voidsmith
Not as a convenience — as a fact about the architecture. This site is static and has no endpoint that could receive it. You can check that in your browser network tab while a generation runs.
Sensible precautions anyway
Set a monthly spend limit in the Anthropic console. Use a key made for this and nothing else, so you can revoke it without breaking anything. And do not paste a production key into any website, including this one.