BYOK (Bring Your Own Key)

In plain English

With BYOK, the platform is a client, not a reseller: you paste in your OpenAI or Anthropic key, and every request the app makes runs against your provider quota and your provider's data-retention terms. The benefits are real — you pay the raw provider rate with no platform markup, your usage falls under contracts you already signed, and you can revoke access by rotating one key. The trade-offs are also real: you juggle multiple keys and dashboards, you inherit each provider's rate limits, and you lose the smoothing an aggregator provides (unified billing, one balance, cross-provider routing). BYOK suits teams with large existing provider commitments or strict procurement rules. Most individuals and small teams prefer a managed, credit-based aggregator that hides key management entirely. The security-critical rule never changes: a BYOK key must stay server-side and must never appear in client-side code.