Using the Anthropic Python SDK with claudeapi.cheap

Installation

Install the official Anthropic SDK:

pip install anthropic

Basic Usage

Just two changes from the official setup: base_url and api_key.

from anthropic import Anthropic

client = Anthropic(
    base_url="https://claudeapi.cheap/api/proxy",
    api_key="sk-cc-your-api-key"
)

message = client.messages.create(
    model="claude-sonnet-4-6",
    max_tokens=1024,
    messages=[
        {"role": "user", "content": "What is machine learning?"}
    ]
)

print(message.content[0].text)

Streaming

with client.messages.stream(
    model="claude-sonnet-4-6",
    max_tokens=1024,
    messages=[{"role": "user", "content": "Write a haiku about coding"}]
) as stream:
    for text in stream.text_stream:
        print(text, end="", flush=True)

System Prompts

message = client.messages.create(
    model="claude-opus-4-6",
    max_tokens=2048,
    system="You are a senior Python developer. Be concise.",
    messages=[
        {"role": "user", "content": "Review this code: def add(a,b): return a+b"}
    ]
)

Environment Variables

For cleaner code, set environment variables:

export ANTHROPIC_API_KEY="sk-cc-your-api-key"
export ANTHROPIC_BASE_URL="https://claudeapi.cheap/api/proxy"

Then your code is identical to official usage:

client = Anthropic()  # reads from env vars

Error Handling

from anthropic import APIError, RateLimitError

try:
    message = client.messages.create(...)
except RateLimitError:
    print("Rate limited, retrying...")
except APIError as e:
    print(f"API error: {e.message}")

All Models Available

Get your API key â