Bring your own key

Dustav runs on your own Anthropic (Claude) API key — you bring the key, and the AI talks straight to Anthropic under your account. That's what BYOK ("bring your own key") means: you pay Anthropic directly for the model usage, and we're never in the middle of it.

How it works

When you set up Dustav, you paste in your Anthropic API key (it starts with sk-ant-). Every message your agent processes runs on that key, billed to your Anthropic account. We encrypt the key at rest and use it only to run your agent — you can swap it or remove it anytime under Settings → Your API key.

Getting a key

If you don't have one yet, it's a couple of minutes:

1. Make an Anthropic account at platform.claude.com — that's the company behind Claude.
2. Add a little credit. Anthropic API usage is pay-as-you-go, so the account needs a small prepaid balance before a key will work. This is what funds the agent's thinking — it bills to you, not to us.
3. Create an API key (it starts with sk-ant-) and paste it when you set up Dustav, or anytime later under Settings → Your API key. We encrypt it at rest and never show it again; you can swap or remove it whenever you like.

One gotcha: web search

If you want Dustav to look things up on the web, you have to turn that on once in your Anthropic console (Settings → Privacy at platform.claude.com) — because web search runs through your account too. Until you do, a search just comes back empty rather than the agent guessing. Everything else works the moment your key is in.

What it costs

Running a frontier model on every message isn't free, so BYOK means you pay Anthropic directly for the thinking — usually cents per message. We don't hide that: the app shows you what your key has actually spent (see cost & caching). Getting started with Dustav is free up to a set number of messages; after that, Dustav Plus is a subscription for the product across your whole household, while the model usage stays between you and Anthropic, on your own key.