Pay for Claude with Affirm: Claude Pro, the API and Claude Code

You cannot pay for Claude Pro or Max with Affirm: Anthropic accepts only credit or debit cards for subscriptions bought on the web, and neither the App Store nor Google Play lists Affirm among its US payment methods (sources read October 3, 2026). You can use Affirm for the Claude API, and for Claude Code on an API key, through Kunavo, an independent API gateway. Its Stripe checkout offers Affirm on US-dollar top-ups of $100 and up, not at $10, to buyers in the United States. On $100 that can be Pay in 4 at 0% APR; for larger top-ups Stripe's default Affirm table lists monthly plans, some at 0% APR and some with interest, and Affirm decides the offer. It is a prepaid API balance, not a Claude subscription. Prices verified October 3, 2026.

Short answer: can you pay for Claude with Affirm?

Affirm only shows up where the seller has added it to its own checkout, so the answer turns on who sends you the bill:

• Claude Pro or Max on claude.ai: no. Affirm is not among the options: Anthropic's paid-plan billing FAQ limits web subscriptions to credit or debit cards. Its payment article says it accepts credit and debit cards for all purchases and does not take third-party payment processors such as PayPal or Venmo. Affirm is not mentioned.
• Claude Pro or Max in the iPhone or Android app: no. Bought inside the app, the plan is charged by Apple or Google, not by Anthropic, per the same FAQ. The methods Apple lists for US accounts (account balance, Apple Card, Apple Cash, Apple Pay, most cards, PayPal) and Google Play's US methods (cards, Play balance and gift cards, Google Pay balance, Cash App Pay, PayPal, Venmo) contain no Affirm and no other pay-over-time service.
• Anthropic's API Console, and OpenAI's: no. Anthropic's payment article names cards (and ACH for some enterprise and API accounts on monthly invoicing). OpenAI's help article on declined cards says prepaid cards cannot buy API credits and only standard credit or debit cards are supported (read October 3, 2026).
• Claude API usage, and Claude Code on an API key: yes, on a Kunavo top-up of $100 or more. Affirm is offered at the Stripe checkout on US-dollar top-ups of $100 and up. It is not shown on the $10 top-up. The rest of this page is that route.

Which top-ups show Affirm, and what Affirm offers on each

Kunavo sells pay-per-token access to Claude and GPT from a prepaid balance, in fixed top-up amounts. Stripe's Affirm docs limit an Affirm purchase to $35–$30,000 and publish which plans Affirm's default financing package offers at each cart size. Here is each top-up against that table:

Kunavo's live Stripe account was probed at two amounts on October 3, 2026: a $10 checkout listed no Affirm, and a $100 US-dollar payment request listed it. No Affirm top-up has been paid yet. The $1,000 and $5,000 top-ups were not probed; they sit inside Affirm's range and go through the same checkout. The plan column is Stripe's published table, read October 3, 2026; Stripe says Affirm determines the terms and cart ranges and can change them, so the offer Affirm shows you on its own screen is the one that counts. The bonus is the same whichever method pays.

• Interest. Pay in 4 is 0% APR. Affirm's disclosure gives 0–36% APR based on credit, subject to an eligibility check, and says a down payment may be required. Stripe gives 10–36% APR for the interest-bearing plans, with an example: an $800 purchase might cost $72.12 a month over 12 months at 15% APR.
• Fees. Affirm advertises upfront interest and no late fees (Affirm, how it works). The top-up costs the same number of dollars whichever method pays.

Worked example, $100 on Pay in 4. Four interest-free payments of $25, two weeks apart. Affirm pays for the top-up and collects from you over time (Stripe), so the balance is credited with $110 at once, bonus included. At Claude Sonnet 5's rates of $1.40 per 1M input tokens and $7.00 per 1M output tokens, a request that sends 2,000 tokens and gets 500 back costs about $0.0063, so $110 covers roughly 17,460 of them. Treat that as a rough guide: Claude Code sessions resend large contexts, so each of their steps costs more than this example.

Who can use Affirm

These are Affirm's rules, not Kunavo's. Its application help page (read October 3, 2026) asks that you:

• live in the United States, US territories included;
• are at least 18 (Affirm notes a higher age in some cases);
• have a Social Security number;
• own a phone number that receives SMS and is registered in the US or a US territory.

Your credit. Affirm says checking your eligibility doesn't harm your credit score, and that creating an account or checking your purchasing power won't affect it (Affirm, declined applications; Affirm, credit reporting). A plan you take is reported: all Affirm payment plans and payment activity, on-time, late and missed, go to Experian, and plans started on or after May 1, 2025 to TransUnion too. Pay in 4 is one of those plans.

Declines. Affirm considers each application separately, so a decline today does not stop you applying again later. Affirm's customer care cannot change the outcome of an application, and Kunavo cannot see or change it either.

Step by step: pay for the Claude API with Affirm

1. Create a Kunavo account (email or Google sign-in). Sign-up asks for no payment details; Affirm comes in only at the top-up.
2. Open Billing and pick a top-up of $100 or more. A brand-new account's first top-up is capped, so start with $100; $1,000 and $5,000 unlock once your first payment clears.
3. Confirm the Stripe page shows the amount in US dollars (a price converted to another currency hides Affirm), then select Affirm.
4. Affirm's site or app opens. Log in or create an Affirm account, pick a plan and accept its terms. Stripe's docs allow up to 12 hours for this, but Kunavo's checkout page expires one hour after it is created, so finish within the hour. If it lapses, start a new top-up from Billing.
5. Back on Kunavo, the balance is credited once Stripe confirms the payment, which Stripe lists as immediate for Affirm. No Affirm top-up has settled on Kunavo's account yet, so we cannot say from our own records how long that takes. Your bank statement will show “Affirm” along with a merchant identifier.
6. Create a key under API keys. It starts with sk-kn- and is shown once. Then make the first call:

# After the Affirm top-up is credited, this is the first call.
curl https://api.kunavo.com/v1/chat/completions \
  -H "Authorization: Bearer $KUNAVO_API_KEY" \
  -H "Content-Type: application/json" \
  -d '{
    "model": "claude-sonnet-5",
    "messages": [{"role": "user", "content": "One line: is the balance live?"}]
  }'

Claude Code runs on the same key. Pin the model so it does not follow whatever Claude Code defaults to:

# Claude Code on the same key and the same balance
export ANTHROPIC_BASE_URL=https://api.kunavo.com   # no /v1
export ANTHROPIC_AUTH_TOKEN=sk-kn-...
export ANTHROPIC_MODEL=claude-sonnet-5
claude

If the balance does not show, refresh Billing before paying again: a second checkout becomes a second Affirm plan. Other clients are covered in the Claude Code setup docs and the quickstart.

Who sees Affirm at Kunavo's checkout

Through Stripe, Affirm serves customers in the United States and Canada, in US or Canadian dollars, with the UK in private preview, and it takes domestic transactions only. It is not available with Stripe's Adaptive Pricing, and Stripe shows it only when the customer's country is supported, judged by the shipping address or, without one, by the IP address (Stripe's Affirm docs, read October 3, 2026). Kunavo collects no shipping address, so your connection decides. In practice:

• A checkout in US dollars, opened from the United States: Affirm is offered from $100.
• A checkout Stripe has converted to another currency, Canadian dollars included: no Affirm. Kunavo shows local currencies through Adaptive Pricing, which Affirm does not support, so a Canadian buyer does not get it here even though Stripe supports Affirm in Canada.
• A VPN or proxy that exits outside the US: no Affirm.

If Affirm does not appear, or declines

• Check the amount. Affirm is not shown on the $10 top-up; go back to Billing and pick $100 or more.
• Check the currency. If the checkout shows anything other than US dollars, Affirm will not appear.
• Turn off a VPN. With no shipping address on file, Stripe places you by IP address, so only a US exit makes you eligible. Then start a fresh checkout from Billing.
• If Affirm declines, you can apply again later, or pay another way at the same checkout.

The US-dollar checkout offers other methods. Zip, another pay-later option, also appears from $100. Klarna and Afterpay appear on US-dollar checkouts, the $10 one included. Cash App Pay, ACH bank debit (credited after it settles, 3–5 business days), crypto (stablecoins), cards, Apple Pay, Google Pay and Link round out the list. Each pay-later provider sets its own terms; the pay for Claude without a credit card hub summarises them by country, and paying for an AI API with crypto covers stablecoins. Not offered at all: PayPal and Venmo.

Refunds on an Affirm top-up

• Kunavo's terms. Top-ups are non-refundable once consumed by API usage. Closing your account refunds the remaining balance to the original payment method, less payment processor fees (terms, section 2). Other refunds are case by case (an outage on Kunavo's side, a pricing bug, an accidental double top-up), issued as wallet credit by default and back through Stripe on request (billing docs).
• Wallet credit does not touch your Affirm plan. Your payments to Affirm carry on.
• A refund through Stripe reaches Affirm. Stripe allows it up to 120 days after the original payment, and it takes up to 2 days. Affirm then cancels the remaining scheduled payments and returns what you already paid, minus any interest paid (Stripe). After 120 days Stripe offers no route back through Affirm, so ask early.

What Affirm cannot pay for here

• Auto-recharge. Stripe's Affirm supports neither recurring payments, nor saving the method for later, nor off-session charges, and Kunavo's auto-recharge charges only a saved card or Link.
• Top-ups below $100. Use another method for the $10 top-up.
• Anything outside the API balance. Not Claude Pro or Max, not ChatGPT Plus, and not credits on Anthropic's or OpenAI's consoles.
• Tax paperwork. Kunavo does not issue VAT invoices for any country; Billing lists each top-up with its date, amount and status.

Is it worth financing an API balance?

The balance never expires, there is no subscription or monthly fee, and failed requests are not billed, so nothing on Kunavo's side runs out while you repay. Pay in 4 at 0% on $100 splits the cost into four payments two weeks apart without adding interest. A monthly plan with interest is different: it adds Affirm's APR to a prepaid balance you may spend slowly, and interest already paid is the one part a refund does not return. Prices are in US dollars, so an Affirm checkout never carries Stripe's 2–4% conversion fee.

Other ways to pay, by method

Every method and country in one place: pay for Claude without a credit card. Single-method pages: crypto (USDC), UPI in India and Pix in Brazil. Per-model rates are in Claude API pricing and on the pricing page.

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