Setting up AI
Beatstack’s Develop features send what you have written to an AI model and read a screenplay back. The trial comes with three of those passes on us. Once you own Beatstack, Develop runs on your own account at OpenRouter, which is one login that reaches every major model.
Beatstack takes no cut and never sees the money. You are paying the model makers directly, at their price. We are not a middleman on it and there is no subscription here.
Four steps, about five minutes
- Make a free account at openrouter.ai. Signing in with Google or GitHub is the quickest way.
- Add credit to it. This is the step people skip. A key with no credit behind it looks exactly like a working one until Beatstack asks for something and gets refused. Five or ten dollars goes a very long way — see below.
- Create a key at openrouter.ai/keys and give it any name you like. “Beatstack” is a fine name.
- Copy that key — it starts with
sk-or-v1-— and paste it into Beatstack under Preferences (⌘,), then AI. It is kept in your macOS Keychain and never goes into your project files.
What it actually costs
Models are priced per million words in and out, which is a hard number to picture. In Beatstack terms: developing a whole first draft of a feature runs about a penny on the cheaper models, and around a quarter on the most expensive one we offer. You would have to work hard to spend a dollar in a day.
Beatstack shows you the price of every model next to its name, so nothing is a surprise. There is a free model in the list too, if you would rather not put any money in at all. It is slower and less careful with structure, but it works.
Choosing a model
Once your key is saved, a Model picker appears at the bottom of every AI dialog, under the rule. It is there rather than in Preferences on purpose: which model suits an ask changes with the ask, and a choice made once in a preferences pane is a choice nobody revisits.
You do not have to touch it. The default is a good all-rounder, and the picker is there for the day you want something cheap and fast for rough passes, or a heavyweight for a final polish. Each one says what it is best for and what a generation costs.
If something goes wrong
- “OpenRouter rejected the saved API key.” The key was typed in wrong, or it was deleted at OpenRouter. Make a new one and paste it in again.
- “The OpenRouter account is out of credit.” Step 2. Add credit at openrouter.ai, or pick the free model in the list.
- “Too many requests.” Almost always the free model, which has a per-minute and per-day allowance. Wait a minute, or move to a paid one.
Still stuck?
Email hello@beatstack.io and tell us where you got to. A real person reads it.
Haven’t bought Beatstack yet? Have a look at the pricing.