Analyze

Getting a Claude API key

Last checked: 26 September 2026

Read this first

You do not need a key to use Storydrills. The beat bank, the drills, the lessons, the quizzes, the games, Progress, the reference sheet and the exports all work with no key, no account and no signal.

One feature needs one: Analyze, which grades a draft of your own against a framework. It talks to Claude directly from your browser, using your key.

Your draft never touches our servers. It goes from your browser to Anthropic and the verdict comes back. Hoodworks never sees your script, never stores it, and could not read it if we wanted to. That is why you bring your own key rather than us bundling one — a screenwriter should not have to send an unproduced script through a stranger’s server, and with Storydrills you never do.

The five steps

Go to platform.claude.com and sign in, or create an account. This is a developer account and it is separate from a Claude.ai chat subscription — paying for Claude Pro does not give you API access, and this is the single most common confusion.
Add credit. API usage is prepaid: you load a balance and calls draw from it. Find it under Settings → Billing. Start with the smallest amount that lets you try it — you can always add more, and an unused balance is not a subscription.
Set a spending limit while you are there. The Billing page lets you set your own limit. Set one you would be comfortable seeing on a card statement. Nothing in Storydrills can run up a bill on its own — Analyze costs you something only when you press the button — but a limit means you never have to wonder.
Create the key. Go to Settings → API keys, click Create key, and give it a name — Storydrills will do. The dialog may also ask for a few more things:
- Workspace: choose one. Default Workspace is fine. A key that is not tied to a workspace will not work in Storydrills.
- Expiration: Never is simplest. If you pick a date, Analyze stops working when it passes and you create a new key.
- Linked account: yourself.
Copy the key immediately. It begins sk-ant- and it is shown once, at creation. If you lose it you cannot retrieve it; you create a new one and delete the old. That is a security feature, not an inconvenience.
Paste it into Storydrills: Settings → Advanced → Anthropic API key, then Save. Open Analyze and it will work.

What it costs

Only what you use. There is no monthly fee on an API account — an idle key costs nothing, indefinitely.

Analyze sends your draft once and reads one reply, so a run costs a fraction of a cent to a few cents depending on length and the model. Anthropic publishes current per-token rates; check them rather than trusting a number on a page that will age.

If you never press Analyze, you never spend anything.

Where the key lives, and what can delete it

It is stored in your browser’s storage on this device only. It is never uploaded, never included in an export, and never written to any file Storydrills produces.
It is sent to exactly one place: api.anthropic.com, when you press Analyze.
Settings → Reset settings does not clear it. It is a credential you typed, not a preference the app chose for you.
Settings → Delete everything on this device does clear it, along with everything else. That screen says so before you confirm.
Anything in browser storage is readable by any script running on the page, which is why Storydrills ships no third-party scripts at all.

If you ever think a key has leaked, delete it in the Console and create a new one. That is a thirty-second job and it invalidates the old one everywhere.

When it does not work

What you see	What it means
“model not found” or a 404	Your account cannot use the model Storydrills is asking for. Fix it in Settings → Advanced → Model: change the Model ID to one your account has, and Save. This is a setting precisely because model names change.
401 or “invalid x-api-key”	The key was mistyped, cut short when you pasted it, has expired, or was deleted in the Console. Create a fresh one.
“anthropic-workspace-id is required”	The key is not tied to a workspace. Create a new key and choose a workspace — Default Workspace is fine.
“credit balance is too low”	Top up under Settings → Billing.
A 400 that mentions a spend limit	You reached the limit you set in step 3. Raise it under Settings → Billing.
429 or “rate limited”	Too many requests too quickly. Wait a minute. New accounts start with lower limits that rise with usage history.
Nothing happens, no error	Analyze is the one online feature. Check you have signal.

Still stuck? Email [email protected] and I will walk you through it.