Convene the right council

Create an account any time before August 1 and the entire site is free — every Mid, Upper and Max feature, no credit card and no API key required. On August 1 you'll be asked to pick a plan when you sign in: Mid $5, Upper $10, Max $15, or Max + Council of Code $20 a month. If you don't subscribe you keep the free tier. Subscribers from the earlier $15 All-Access promo are grandfathered: they keep their $15 rate and their full All-Access.

A $20/month plan with everything in Claves Max plus eligibility for the Council of Code, our engineering council for aviation, aerospace, and government-contract support work. Access itself requires a virtual verification appointment confirming US-person status — a clearance code is issued after the appointment, and no payment substitutes for it.

No. Free tier and the server-side councils (four on Mid: Tribunal, Agora, Polyglot, Think Tank; four on Upper: Consul, Foundry, Open World, Hemisphere) work immediately with no key. An OpenRouter key unlocks the premium councils, unlimited paid-plan use, and the web-search toggle — and it's free to create at openrouter.ai.

OpenRouter is a free gateway that gives you access to models from Anthropic, OpenAI, Google, Meta, and others under one API key. Claves uses it to route BYOK sessions to the right model and, when enabled, to OpenRouter web search. Your key lives in your browser for API calls; when you're signed in, Claves also keeps an encrypted backup bound to your account so clearing browsing data or switching devices doesn't lose it — disconnecting your key deletes the backup. Model and search usage is billed by OpenRouter.

Mid tier includes four instant expert councils (The Tribunal, The Agora, The Polyglot, The Think Tank) with no key needed; premium mixes like The Swift Council (Claude Haiku, Gemini Flash) unlock with your own OpenRouter key. Upper tier adds frontier councils including Claude Opus 4.8, GPT-5.5, Grok 4.20, and GPT-5.4, plus per-seat model selection across every council.

Max is the full deliberation tier. It includes everything in Upper, plus Council Memory — your councils open each new conversation with brief notes from your recent consultations, so advice builds instead of starting over — the Apex Structured Blind Pass, where each advisor produces an independent, evidence-ledgered analysis before any cross-examination, the four-advisor project Workbench with its Decision Memo, tier preview, and the highest daily limits. Every instant council works on a server-side key with no setup; the frontier surfaces — the project Workbench (Colloquium of Disputatio), The Studio, and the synthesis councils — run on your own OpenRouter key, unlimited, with web search available.

Conversation History (Upper and Max) is encrypted at rest, scoped to your account, and never used for anything but showing you your own sessions. On Max, Council Memory gives new conversations brief notes from your recent consultations — those digests are encrypted the same way and you can turn Memory off with one click. You can delete individual conversations or your entire history at any time; we keep your most recent 100 conversations. Details are in the Privacy Policy.

Yes, two ways. On any paid plan with your own OpenRouter key connected, the Web Search toggle routes your asks through OpenRouter web search, so every advisor answers with live, internet-grounded context (search usage billed to your OpenRouter account). And The Meridian council seats Perplexity Sonar — a model built for live research — as a permanent advisor.

Pre-prompts are the role and mode instructions each advisor receives — the council persona plus the mode you picked (Advise, Challenge, or Explore). They're on by default, and one click turns them off on any plan, including Free. With pre-prompts off, models answer your question in their own natural voice instead of a council role — but the structure always runs: advisors still cross-examine each other, and on synthesized councils the fourth-model verdict still renders.

Councils are built to degrade invisibly. Every free-council seat runs a chain of backups — the same model on a second and third provider, then a designated stand-in model — and on Upper and Max the synthesizer has an automatic backup too. You can also run the Model Health Check on any paid plan to live-test every model in your tier before an important session.

Yes. Cancel from within the app at any time. Your access continues until the end of the current billing period. We offer a 14-day refund on initial purchases — see the Billing Policy.

One session = one question put to the council. Each session runs blind analysis across three models, then a cross-examination round where models respond to each other — and a fourth model renders a synthesized verdict (Google Gemma on the free Council; stronger synthesizers on Upper and Max). Free includes 10 asks/day. Paid session allowances reset daily; bringing your own key removes the daily cap entirely and can enable web search on supported OpenRouter routes.