API-key accounts
An API-key account lets a tab run Claude Code on an API key instead of your Claude sign-in. It suits a work key beside a personal plan. API keys are the only kind of account you can add besides Default.
Adding an account
- Open Settings → Accounts.
- Under Add an API key, type a Name, such as Work, and paste the API key. The key is hidden as you type.
- Click Add account.
The account appears above the form. Now choose where it’s used: a folder’s account for a folder’s new tabs, or moving a tab for one that’s open.
Where the key is kept
The key goes only to your computer’s credential store: Windows Credential Manager, the macOS Keychain, or the Secret Service through secret-tool on Linux. It’s never in Claudette’s files, a command line, the environment or a log, and it’s never synced. When a tab starts, Claude Code asks Claudette for the key, so it doesn’t have to be anywhere else.
On Linux, adding an account is off until secret-tool is installed (the libsecret-tools package), and Settings says why.
What an account’s tabs share
A tab on an API-key account runs in the same Claude Code configuration folder as the Default account’s, so it shares everything else with it: settings, MCP servers, plugins, skills, transcripts and History. Moving a tab between accounts copies nothing.
The account’s tabs start without ANTHROPIC_API_KEY and ANTHROPIC_AUTH_TOKEN, so the key you added is the one used. Default’s tabs keep them if you’ve set them.
Changing and removing an account
Each account in Settings → Accounts has:
- A name box. Edit it and click away to rename it.
- Tag color, the color of its tag: see A folder’s account.
- Warn when today’s estimated spend passes ($) and Warn when this month’s estimated spend passes ($): see Spend and its warnings.
- Change key…, which shows a box for the new key. Click Save key, or Cancel. Tabs pick up the new key within a few minutes, or when they start again.
- Remove…, which asks first, in place. It’s off while an open tab runs under the account: move those tabs to another account, or close them. Removing it deletes its key, and folders that used it use Default again.
Settings
| Setting | Default | Where |
|---|---|---|
| New folders use | Default | Settings → Accounts |
New folders use is the account a folder uses the first time you open it. The accounts are yours, so Reset to defaults on this page only sets New folders use back to Default and leaves them alone. Each machine sets up its own accounts: they don’t sync, and neither do keys.
If Claude Code refuses the key
A key Claude Code won’t use, or can’t get, is that tab’s own error: Claude Code couldn’t use Work’s API key. Check the key in Settings → Accounts, or move the tab to another account. If Claudette is installed in a folder whose path has a quote, $, % or a backtick in it, a tab can’t use an API-key account, and says why.
What an API key doesn’t have
- Plan limits. There are no meters for it: Spend and its warnings covers what the header shows.
- The Claude app. Its tabs can’t connect to it, since that needs a Claude sign-in. Connect to the Claude app is off, with the reason as its tip. See The Claude app.
See also
- Your Claude sign-in for the Default account.
- Passwords and keys for how keys are stored.