Paying for website edits: your monthly allowance and your Anthropic key

The website Editor is powered by Anthropic, the company behind the Claude AI assistant. Every change you ask for costs a little to run, and there are two ways that gets paid for:

• Your monthly change allowance. Your website comes with an allowance of A$5 a month for changes made in the Editor. Marketli pays for these. You do not need an Anthropic account, and there is nothing to set up.
• Your own Anthropic key. Connect a key and your changes run on your own Anthropic account instead, with no monthly limit from Marketli. You pay Anthropic directly.

Most people start on the allowance and only connect a key if they want to do more editing than it covers.

Your monthly change allowance

The allowance is for small changes: wording, a photo, a colour, a section moved. The Editor shows how much of it you have used, in Australian dollars, under the Editor heading, along with the date it starts again.

A few things worth knowing:

• It is an amount, not a number of changes. What a change costs depends on how much of your site the assistant has to read and how much it alters. A one line wording tweak uses very little. A new page uses a lot more. We cannot honestly tell you how many changes the allowance covers, so we do not.
• It resets on the first of each month (midnight UTC, which is mid morning in eastern Australia). Unused allowance does not carry over.
• It uses the faster assistant. Changes on the allowance always run on the faster, cheaper assistant, which handles most copy and layout work well.
• The figure is a close guide. It counts finished changes, so a draft you are still working on is added when you publish or discard it.

The allowance is there while your site is being built and reviewed, and for as long as your website plan is active. If your plan lapses the allowance stops, and the Editor asks for a key.

When the allowance runs out

The Editor tells you plainly that this month's allowance is used, and everything you have already published stays live. You then have two choices:

1. Connect your own Anthropic key and keep editing straight away.
2. Wait until the first of next month, when the allowance starts again.

If you have a draft open when this happens, publish it or discard it first. A key cannot be connected while a draft is waiting, and the Editor will remind you of that. A draft that was started on the allowance can always be published, even after the allowance has run out.

Connecting your own key

1. Sign in at console.anthropic.com, or create an account. A personal account is fine.
2. Add some credit. Anthropic asks for this before it will run anything, and $20 covers a good few edits.
3. Open API keys and create a new key. It starts with sk-ant-.
4. While you are there, set a monthly spend limit in your Anthropic billing settings. It is the best guard rail there is and it takes a minute.
5. In the Editor, choose Connect my own key, paste the key and press Save.

Marketli checks the key with Anthropic before saving it, so you find out straight away if something is wrong with it, and then sets up the editing assistants inside your Anthropic account. That second step takes a few seconds. Only company owners and admins can see or change the key.

Once a key is connected, your changes run on your own Anthropic account, at cost. Marketli bills you nothing for them and takes no cut, and the monthly allowance is no longer used.

What an edit costs on your own key

A typical edit is about USD $2 to $3 on the best quality assistant, and noticeably less on the faster, cheaper one. A one line wording tweak is cheap and a new page with a blog post costs more.

Two things keep it predictable:

• Every edit is hard-capped at USD $10. Anthropic stops the work before it can spend more than that on a single edit, so no one change can run away, whatever you ask for or however the assistant behaves.
• The cheaper assistant is the default. It handles most copy and layout changes perfectly well.

The Editor shows what your key has spent on edits so far this month, next to the key itself. Treat it as a close guide rather than an invoice: it covers finished edits and it is priced the way Anthropic lists it, so your actual Anthropic bill is the last word.

When an edit reaches its limit

Every request has its own spending limit. On the monthly allowance or Marketli credit, a request that reaches it stops and keeps whatever it finished. The Editor says it stopped part way, checks your site, and lists anything left unfinished, so you know what to ask for next. Your next request in the same draft starts with a fresh limit.

On Marketli credit a draft has no overall limit: it can carry on for as long as you have credit, and the Editor shows what the draft has used so far. If your credit runs out part way through, the draft is kept and the Editor asks you to top up. You are charged for a draft when it is published or discarded, so your balance does not move until then.

On the monthly allowance, a draft that is open when the allowance runs out gets one more request to finish what it was doing. After that the draft is kept: publish what is there, or carry on when the allowance resets.

On your own key, an edit that uses its whole USD $10 before it finishes pauses rather than failing. Nothing is lost: the work so far is still there, and the Editor offers Keep going (another $10), which picks the edit back up from exactly where it stopped.

You can press it more than once, up to a total of about USD $50 on any single edit. Past that the Editor stops offering it, because an edit that has spent that much is genuinely stuck rather than one press from finishing: start a fresh one, and ask for the change in smaller pieces. That is nearly always cheaper and faster than pushing a stuck edit further.

Replacing or removing your key

Once a key is connected you will see Anthropic key ****NNNN with Replace and Remove under the Editor heading:

• Replace swaps in a new key, for example after you rotate keys in the Anthropic console.
• Remove disconnects it. If your website still has its monthly allowance, the Editor goes back to it. Otherwise it asks for a key again and no edits can be made until you connect one.

Neither is allowed while an edit is running or a draft is waiting, so publish or discard it first. You can also revoke the key from the Anthropic console at any time without touching Marketli. That works immediately: the Editor tells you the key stopped working the next time it tries to use it, and offers to take a replacement or to forget the dead one. A key that has stopped working is never quietly replaced by the allowance: the Editor asks you what to do.

What Marketli can and cannot see

Marketli stores your key encrypted and never shows it again anywhere in the app; only its last four digits appear. It is used to run your edits and nothing else.

The conversation history of edits made on your own key is stored by Anthropic in your account, and Marketli reads it back using your key. So if your key stops working, whatever is on screen stays visible but the transcript cannot be reloaded until the key is replaced. If you remove the key, the transcripts of the editing sessions that ran on it become permanently unavailable in Marketli. Your published changes are not affected in any way: they are part of your website.

If you use ChatGPT instead

The key must be an Anthropic API key. A ChatGPT subscription is not an API key, and an OpenAI key does not work here. If you would rather edit your site through ChatGPT, that door is open too: ask your Marketli contact about the Codex connector, which is covered in getting started with your website.