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Your API key

With your own API key, Tria sorts with no limit and you pay your provider directly for what you use. With the default model, about $0.01 per document.

The key is stored in the macOS Keychain, never in your folder or in any log. With your key, documents go from your Mac to Anthropic or OpenAI, and nobody else.

What it is and how to get one

An API key is a long password your AI provider gives you so Tria can use its model on your behalf. It’s pay-as-you-go, separate from any subscription: a subscription to the provider’s chat app won’t do.

  1. Create an account in the Anthropic Console or on the OpenAI Platform.
  2. Add a payment method.
  3. Create a key and copy it so you can paste it into Tria.
On Anthropic, the key has to belong to a workspace. If it doesn’t, Tria warns you: create the key inside a workspace in the Anthropic Console and save it again.

In the app

In Settings (⌘,) › AI Source, choose “My Key”. Then, under “AI with Your Key”:

  • Provider: Anthropic or OpenAI.
  • Model: Haiku 5.5, Sonnet 5.5 (recommended) or Opus 5.5; or GPT-5.4 mini and GPT-5.4 nano. With “Other…” you can type the identifier of any other model.
  • API Key: paste it and click “Save Key”. Tria never shows it again: you’ll see “A key is saved in the Keychain”, with “Change” and “Delete”.

If you’d rather stay on Tria AI, you can still save a key: “Use My Key” will keep reading with it when your balance runs out.

In the CLI

bash
tria config --provider anthropic --set-key# asks for it without showing ittria config --model claude-opus-5-5# another modeltria config --model ""# back to the defaulttria config# provider, model and key, maskedtria config --delete-key# removes it from the Keychain

The default models are claude-sonnet-5-5 on Anthropic and gpt-5.4-mini on OpenAI. The provider and model are saved in ~/.config/tria/config.toml, which never contains the key.

Instead of the Keychain you can use the ANTHROPIC_API_KEY or OPENAI_API_KEY variables: if they’re set, they take precedence over the saved key. If you use both the app and the CLI, save the key in each one.

What you spend

In the app, Settings › Spending with Your Key shows what you’ve spent this month, and Usage (⌘5) breaks it down. If you turn on “Pause at a monthly limit” and enter an amount in “Limit (USD)”, Tria stops reading when it gets there: whatever comes in waits in the inbox until next month or until you raise the limit. Before reading more than 100 documents at once, Tria tells you how much it will cost.

In the CLI, every tria sort ends with the tokens and the approximate cost. tria rules learn, tria rules ask and tria eval tell you beforehand how much they’ll cost.

The app and the CLI each keep their own count of what you spend. With a hand-typed model Tria doesn’t know, it can’t work out the cost.