How does Anthropic billing work with InsertLead's BYOK model?

How to get an Anthropic API key

1. Sign up at console.anthropic.com. Verify your email.
2. Add billing info under Settings → Billing.
3. Drop a $10 prepaid deposit. (Yes, you can fund less, but the minimum reload Anthropic offers is $5 and $10 is a more comfortable buffer.)
4. Turn on Auto Reload with a threshold (e.g., when balance drops below $2, top up to $10).
5. Go to API Keys → Create Key. Copy the key immediately — Anthropic only shows it on creation, never again.
6. Paste the key into InsertLead Settings.

The prepaid + auto-reload pattern

Anthropic supports both prepaid and post-pay billing. We strongly recommend prepaid + auto-reload for InsertLead users:

• No surprise invoices. Post-pay billing means you find out at end of month how much you spent. Prepaid means you funded what you wanted to spend up front.
• Capped exposure. If your key got compromised somehow, the worst case is the reload-amount limit. With post-pay, a leaked key could rack up thousands before you noticed.
• Mental model alignment. "$10 in the tank, lasts a month" is closer to how SMS marketing actually feels than "calculate token usage and check invoice."

Suggested starter setting: $10 prepaid, threshold $2, reload-to $10. If you start running heavy volume, bump to $25/$5/$25 or higher.

Realistic monthly cost

Hard to give a single number because it varies with reply rate and conversation length, but here are honest ranges:

• Light user (300 leads sent / month, ~30 reply, ~3 turns each): ~$0.30-$0.80/mo.
• Active user (2,000 leads / month, ~200 reply, ~4 turns each): ~$3-$7/mo.
• Power user (10,000 leads / month, ~1,500 reply, ~5 turns each): ~$20-$40/mo.

Pricing source: Anthropic pricing. Claude Haiku 4.5 is $1/M input and $5/M output tokens; cached input is 90% off.

Setting an InsertLead-side budget cap

In addition to Anthropic's Auto Reload threshold, InsertLead has its own per-user monthly cap inside Settings. When this month's AI spend (computed from token counts on every Claude call) crosses your cap, the autoresponder pauses automatically.

Two layers of cost control:

• Anthropic-side: hard ceiling. If your prepaid balance hits $0, API calls fail. Auto Reload tops up but you control the threshold.
• InsertLead-side: soft cap. The autoresponder respects it and pauses, but you can manually unpause if you want to override for a specific conversation.

Suggested setting: Anthropic Auto Reload at $25 hard ceiling, InsertLead per-user cap at $20 soft cap. If you blow through $20 mid-month and need more, you can raise it without leaving the InsertLead UI.

How we store and use your key

Stored Fernet-encrypted in our database, decrypted only in-memory at request time, never logged, never displayed back to you in the UI after you save it, never shared between tenants.

If you ever rotate your key in Anthropic's console, paste the new one into InsertLead Settings — the old encrypted value is overwritten on save. The old key continues working in Anthropic's system until you explicitly revoke it there.