Price of AI Assistant integration with Claude

Hi Jana, https://www.jetbrains.com/ai/ look for Plans and Pricing. There is no free option that lasts for months (the expected duration of my project). There is also no option for not using the Intellij backend, but bringing “your own” backend (Claude.ai + api key in my case). 

Thank you for the clarification.

Yes, you are right. Right now, it is not possible to use your own API key/account for LLM models with AI Pro (individual subscription). It is currently available only for organizations via the AI Enterprise offering. Please vote for and follow  this feature request for progress updates: https://youtrack.jetbrains.com/issue/LLM-11585. Apologies for the inconvenience.

That’s a tricky setup. From what I’ve seen, JetBrains doesn’t let you just connect your own Claude API key. Their AI Assistant runs on their managed service (mostly via Bedrock), which is why they charge separately. Basically, even if you’re already paying for Claude, IntelliJ still requires its own subscription to unlock the AI features. Hopefully, they open it up in the future so people with existing Claude plans aren’t double charged.

This is just flat out wrong and makes IntelliJ look bad.  You can use Claude Code in IntelliJ without paying for any “Jetbrains AI Assistant” or anything like that.  Jetbrains AI Assistant is an alternative to Claude Code.  It's not in any way required to use Claude Code in IntelliJ, which I do daily for hours at a time. 

There is a Claude Code plugin, or just open a terminal in IntelliJ and type “claude”.  Done.  I'm not sure what the confusion is.  If you're running both Claude and IntelliJ it will even automatically detect IntelliJ and suggest you enter ‘/ide’ into Claude's command prompt.  This will automatically integrate Claude with IntelliJ.  It couldn't be easier.

And just fyi, “Claude Code” is a piece of software that runs on your computer.  Claude (Sonnet, Opus, etc) is the name of the model by Anthropic.  They're two separate things and not equivalent.  You can use Claude Code with another LLM by running an LLM Gateway, you can use other software besides Claude Code with the Claude model.  If you could ‘bring your own API key’ and use Claude w/ Jetbrains AI Assistant, it would not magically turn it into Claude Code.  It's a different piece of software.  

Another minor thing, but if you have a Claude Pro/Max/whatever subscription, that does not provide you with access to an API key anyway.  You can only use that subscription with Claude Desktop and Claude Code.  The TOS does not allow you to take those credentials and plug it into a different automation tool.  So even if Jetbrains AI Assistant did allow bringing an API key, you would be billed separately from and in addition to any Claude subscription you may have.

Lastly, you CAN ‘bring your own API key' to pretty much ANY AI software by running an LLM Gateway.  An LLM Gateway takes requests in one format (e.g., OpenAI API) and translates them to another format (e.g., Bedrock).  If you can't find one that does what you need out of the box (or have any questions in general), ask Claude and it'll write one for you no problem.

I just discovered this thread after hitting a quota limit which originally I thought was for claude but turned out to be IntelliJ

Yeah this is really bad, if you are saying I need to pay for an additional quota to use the IntelliJ chatbot UI and then use Claude then that is a hard no. 
Don't get me wrong I understand where JetBrains is coming from, they have provided a very tight integration that is consistent in look and feel no matter the agent you choose and accurately communicates to the agent what you are looking at in the code. 
This takes a fair bit of work and also with how things are rapidly changing keeping pace with the changes also means many things likely break.

That being said however, a secondary charge on top of the charge you are also getting from claude for example is not going to happen for many. When you add the claude, gemini, chatgpt extension itself or just go to the terminal it makes little sense to pay an extra cost like this unless you have money lying around you want to burn through