Overview
Claude models via API
Best for: Chat completions; long-context analysis; tool use; computer use; batch processing; embeddings
At a glance
Pricing
- Difficulty
- Beginner-friendly
- Time to productivity
- 1 hour
- Privacy
- High
- Learning curve
- Moderate
Ideal for
Key capabilities
Works with
- Text
- images (input)
- documents
- code
Outputs
- JSON API responses
- streaming
- batch results
Mobile access
How to use Anthropic API on phones and tablets.
- Mobile web: Works in a mobile browser (responsive or dedicated mobile site).
Free Tier
Free: $5 initial credits; rate-limited; all Claude models accessible
Limits: Free: $5 credits; pay-per-use after; rate limits by tier; batch API for 50% cost reduction
When to upgrade: Credit exhaustion; higher rate limits; prompt caching; batch API volume; fine-tuning (emerging)
Technical Details
Alternatives
GPT models, embeddings, whisper, TTS via API
Free: $5 initial credits (new accounts); rate-limited; GPT-4o-mini free tier
Enterprise ML/AI platform with Gemini models
Free: $300 Google Cloud free trial credits; Gemini API free tier via AI Studio (1,500 req/day)
Managed access to multiple foundation models
Free: AWS Free Tier: limited model usage for first 2 months; varies by model
OpenAI models on Azure infrastructure
Free: Azure free account: $200 credits for 30 days; OpenAI models included