Costs and your API key
How Contexta's bring-your-own-key model works, what each action costs, and how to keep AI spend under control.
Costs and your API key
Contexta uses your Anthropic API key. You pay Anthropic directly for what you use. We never resell AI credits, never mark them up, and never proxy your requests through our servers.
That means two bills, not one: the plugin licence, and whatever Anthropic charges for the generations you run.
Getting a key
- Create an account at console.anthropic.com
- Add billing
- Go to Settings → API keys and create a key
- Paste it into Contexta → Settings → General
A key can be used across several sites. On WordPress 7.0+ you can store it once in Settings → Connectors and share it with every plugin — see Settings.
Seeing what you spend
Contexta tracks token usage for every action and shows it in three places in the editor's top bar:
- All — total tokens and cost across every article, since install
- Page — total for the article you have open
- Last action — what the generation you just ran cost
Costs are estimated from published Anthropic per-million-token rates. Treat them as close approximations for budgeting, and your Anthropic console as the source of truth for billing.
Roughly what things cost
Exact figures depend on the model you pick and how long your content is, but the relative ordering is stable:
| Action | Relative cost |
|---|---|
| SEO title + meta | Smallest — capped at 600 output tokens by default |
| FAQ / intro / single section | Small |
| Competitor research | Moderate, and cached 30 days so it runs once per article |
| Full rewrite | Largest — scales with article length |
| Proofread | Moderate — two passes over the content |
| Quality score, format analysis | Small |
| Commerce Readiness audit | Free — no AI calls at all |
| Problem Map, AI Traffic, Access Check | Free — no AI calls at all |
Choosing Claude Haiku 4.5 instead of a frontier model cuts cost substantially, which makes it a sensible pick for large batch runs where you'll review the output anyway.
Keeping spend under control
Set a budget in the Anthropic console. This is the real safety net — a hard spend limit on your account that no plugin bug or enthusiastic colleague can exceed.
Use the rate limit. Contexta caps AI actions per user per hour, 50 by default. On a multi-author site this is your protection against a surprise bill.
Lower the token limits. 600 for SEO and 2000 for content are the defaults. Reducing them directly reduces cost per generation.
Be deliberate with batch runs. Batch multiplies cost by the number of articles times the number of tasks. Run it on 5 articles first, look at the counter, then scale up.
Competitor research caches for 30 days. Don't re-run it on the same article unnecessarily — the findings are reused automatically by every later generation.
What is sent to Anthropic
Only what a generation needs, and only when you click something:
- The article's title, content and URL
- The page's ranking queries from your Search Console import
- Your site memory context block
- Competitor research findings, when they exist
There are no background API calls. Contexta does not generate anything on a schedule, on save, or on page load. Every request follows a click.
Your Search Console data stays in your WordPress database. Only the queries relevant to the page you are working on travel with a prompt.
If AI features stop working
- "No API key configured" — the key is missing or was removed
- "Model not found" — your account lacks access to the selected model; switch to Sonnet 4.6 or Haiku 4.5
- Rate limit message — you hit the per-hour cap; wait, or raise it in Settings
- Licence not active — AI endpoints are gated behind activation
More in Troubleshooting.