Can you sell Anthropic (Claude API) credits?
Anthropic's Credit Terms prohibit transferring or selling credits, paid or promotional, and limit use to the account holder. What that rules out, and what's left.
Of the five providers we track, Anthropic is the clearest, and it is clear in the restrictive direction. If you hold Claude API credit you won't use, it's worth knowing exactly what the terms say before anyone offers to buy it.
What the terms say
Anthropic's Credit Terms state:
"Customer may not transfer or sell Credits, whether paid for or provided as part of a promotion, to any other person or entity"
Two things stand out.
It covers paid credit as well as promotional credit. Some providers' restrictions apply mainly to promotional or programme credit. Anthropic's applies whether you bought the credit or were given it.
Use is limited to the account holder. The same passage says credits may only be used by the holder of the account they belong to. That closes the obvious workaround: if you hand someone your API key so they can spend your balance, a non-holder is using the credit.
You can read the full document through the link on our credit transfer rules page, which records the date we last checked it.
What this rules out
- Selling the balance outright. Prohibited in so many words.
- Sharing an API key with a buyer. That is use by someone other than the account holder, and it makes their traffic yours, including any usage-policy problems it causes.
- Adding the buyer to your workspace so they can spend the balance. Same problem with an extra step.
Anyone offering to buy Claude credit is proposing one of these, whatever they call it.
Check what you actually hold
In the Claude Console, open Settings → Billing to see the credit balance and any expiry on granted credit, then compare it with your actual spend on the Usage page. Startup and programme credit often expires sooner than people remember. Knowing the date tells you how much time you have to use it well.
What you can do with Claude credit you won't sell
- Run the work you've been putting off. Large evaluation suites, document processing backlogs, classification of historical data and test-set generation are all good uses of a balance that's going to expire.
- Use batch processing for bulk jobs. Offline workloads processed in batches usually cost less per token than real-time calls, so the balance stretches further.
- Use prompt caching on repeated context. If your workload sends the same long context repeatedly, caching it reduces what each call consumes.
- Talk to Anthropic. If the balance came from a programme or a commercial agreement, your contact there is the right person to ask about extensions or changes.
If the company itself is changing hands
In an acquisition or wind-down, the account goes with whatever happens to the company, and that happens under the commercial agreements. Raise it with Anthropic as part of the transaction. It's a different thing from selling credit to a third party.
Want a second opinion?
If you have Anthropic credit and want an honest read of your options, send us the details. A person will reply within 24–48 hours. For Anthropic credit the reply is usually that it can't be sold, along with suggestions for using it well.