Moving Claude Max to a Team plan: API keys are the work

I moved our Claude accounts from an individual Max plan to a company Team plan. I did it by hand, because at the time there was no migration path. By the time I write this, Anthropic has documented one. If you are doing this now, the chat side is mostly solved for you. The API keys are not, and that was the part that actually cost me something.

What I did, and why by hand

I had a Max plan. The second person in the company had a separate individual paid account. The company needed one bill, shared projects, and one place where the work lives.

At that point there was no way to convert an individual account into an organization. So I exported the data, created the Team organization, and set everything up again by hand. Nothing was lost and nothing broke. It was slow rather than risky.

One thing to check before you start, because it is easy to miss: the person who creates the Team organization has to use a business email address. Public domains like gmail.com are not accepted for the creator. Other members can be invited on other domains once those domains are permitted, but the creator cannot.

What Anthropic moves for you now

This is the good news, and it is recent. As of September 2026 the help centre describes a supported voluntary migration into a Team or Enterprise workspace. If your personal account sits on the same email address as the organization, you get a choice when you accept the invite: keep both accounts, or use the organization account only and bring your data with you.

What it carries, according to the documentation: chats, artifacts inside chats, projects with their instructions and files, uploaded files, project sync configuration, Claude's memory from chats and projects, and Claude Code memory and personal settings. A few months ago you would have rebuilt all of that by hand, the way I did.

Two conditions on that. The move is one way, so once content is in the organization it cannot go back to a personal account. And if you own both the personal account and the organization, you have to start the migration from the organization account. If you created the org from your personal account and stay signed in there, the option to close the personal account does not appear, and it looks like the feature is missing.

What still does not move

The list of exceptions is short and it matters.

• Custom skills. The documentation says plainly that there is no migration path for them. Export anything you want to keep before you start.
• Sign-ins to connected apps. All authorizations are revoked, and you reconnect each app from the organization account.
• Custom connectors you added yourself. You add them again, and your organization's policy may not allow them.
• Published artifacts, because publishing is not available on Team and Enterprise plans.
• Public share links to chats. Those stop working permanently.

If your Max plan came through the Apple App Store, Anthropic cannot cancel it for you. You cancel it in your Apple ID settings, otherwise Apple keeps charging after the personal account closes.

The part nobody warns you about: API keys

Nothing above touches API keys, because API keys are not part of the subscription at all.

The chat product and the developer console are two systems with two bills. A Pro or Max subscription includes no API credits. Keys live inside a workspace in a Console organization, and credentials do not transfer between organizations. So when the company becomes the account that should be paying, the keys have to be created again in the company organization and then replaced in every place that uses one.

That was the real cost of the move for me. It is not hard, it is just tedious and easy to half-finish. Regenerate the key, update it in each project that calls the API, check that the usage now lands on the company organization, then delete the old key. The last step is the one people skip. An old key that still works is two problems at once: a bill on the wrong account, and access nobody is watching.

What it cost

No data loss, no outage, nothing broke. What it took was setting up an organization that already existed in another form, plus rotating keys across the projects that use them. I did not time it, so I will not put a number on it. Had I waited, the supported migration would have removed most of the first part and none of the second.

What I still do not know

I do not know whether the supported migration works when the personal account is on a different email address than the organization. The documentation describes it for a personal account on the same address as the org. A solo who paid for Max on a personal address for two years and registered the company later is the normal case, and I cannot tell from the docs that there is a path for that one. If you are in that situation, plan for the manual route.

I also cannot say whether skills will stay unmigratable. It is the one gap Anthropic could close, and the one that costs the most to rebuild.