Two ways to pay, your choice
AtmosphereAGI supports two billing paths. The default is prepaid credits: a $25 starter pack, top-ups of $25, $50, or $100, credited 1:1 against usage and never expiring, with every run billed at Anthropic's pass-through sticker rate and zero markup. The second path is bring-your-own-key: if you already hold an Anthropic API key, you plug it in and pay Anthropic directly for inference. This post is about the second path — who it is for, how the key is protected, and how to decide.
Who BYO is for
BYO makes sense if the Anthropic side of your life already exists. Maybe you have an API account for other projects and want a single invoice for all Claude usage. Maybe your company issues keys centrally and finance wants inference spend on the existing vendor relationship rather than a new one. Maybe you simply prefer that the model bill comes from the model vendor. In all these cases, BYO lets you keep your billing relationship with Anthropic while using AtmosphereAGI as the agent runtime on top.
If none of that applies — you have no Anthropic account and no wish to manage one — the credit path is simpler. Because our credit pricing is already pass-through at sticker rate, you are not paying a markup penalty for choosing convenience. The two paths differ in who invoices you for inference, not in what the inference costs.
How your key is protected
Handing any service an API key is an act of trust, so here is exactly what we do with it, in plain terms. Your key is encrypted at rest with AES-256-GCM — an authenticated encryption standard, meaning the ciphertext cannot be silently tampered with. After you save the key, the full value is never displayed again anywhere in the product; only the last four characters are shown back to you, enough to confirm which key is on file and nothing more.
Deletion is immediate and irreversible. When you remove your key from the dashboard, it is gone — there is no soft-delete grace period and no way for us or you to recover it. If you want to rotate, you delete the old key, generate a fresh one in the Anthropic console, and save the new one. We built it this way deliberately: the safest place for a revocation decision to take effect is instantly.
One habit worth adopting regardless of platform: create a dedicated key for AtmosphereAGI in your Anthropic console rather than reusing a key shared with other tools. Dedicated keys make your Anthropic usage dashboard legible — you can see exactly what agent runs cost — and make rotation surgical if you ever want it.
What changes in day-to-day use
Functionally, nothing. Your tasks run in the same Manus-style live task card, you watch the same step-by-step execution, and you finish with the same downloadable files. The difference is purely on the billing wire: with BYO, each model call in a run is made against your key, so the inference charges appear on your Anthropic invoice at Anthropic's rates. Your Anthropic console becomes the source of truth for token spend, and Anthropic's own rate limits on your account apply to your runs.
That last point is the one practical caveat: if your Anthropic account tier has tight rate limits, heavy agent runs will feel them. Check your tier in the Anthropic console before pointing serious workloads at a fresh key.
Deciding between the two paths
A simple decision rule. Choose credits if you want zero account overhead, like the idea of prepaid spend that never expires, or are just trying the product — $25 in, run tasks, every step itemised at sticker rate. Choose BYO if you already live in the Anthropic ecosystem, want consolidated vendor billing, or have organisational reasons to keep inference spend on your own account. And note the paths are not a lifetime commitment: you can start on credits to evaluate the product, then add a key later once the workload justifies it.
Setting it up
The flow is short: generate a key in the Anthropic console, open your AtmosphereAGI billing settings, paste the key, and confirm — you will see the last four characters echoed back as verification that it saved. From that point, runs bill against your key. Removing it later is one click and takes effect immediately. If you have been waiting for a reason to try agent delegation without opening a second billing relationship, this is it: bring the key you already have, keep your Anthropic invoice as the single ledger, and let the runtime do the rest.