Connect your own AI keys

Some apps call AI models. Rather than bundling model costs into the price, those apps can run on your provider key: you pay your provider directly for what you use, and the app's price stays what the creator set.

This is usually called BYOK — bring your own key.

What is live and what is planned

Live. The Key Vault is running. Each purchase of a hosted app gets its own Vault token, and it ends if the purchase is refunded. Through that token the app can hold your key for one of four providers — Anthropic, OpenAI, Google or Mistral — and call that provider with it. The key is encrypted, never returned to the app or to your browser, and used only inside the Vault.

Live. A key belongs to one app. The Vault stores it per app and per buyer, so a key you give one app is not available to another, and you give it again to each app that needs it.

Planned. One place in your account settings to add a key once and reuse it across apps. There is none today.

Planned. A field on the listing that names the provider an app needs. Today, read the listing's description, and expect the key to be asked for by the app itself.

Panoply does not use your key for its own inference.

For creators: what the Vault forwards

Your app calls the Vault at https://keyvault.panop.ly/run/<provider>/<path> with the buyer's Vault token, in the provider's own request format. The Vault forwards one endpoint per provider, each provider's standard chat endpoint, and refuses every other path:

The Vault also limits what it forwards:

• It supplies the key itself, so a request carrying its own key parameter is refused.
• Request bodies are capped at 4 MB.
• The provider has 60 seconds to start answering. A stream that has started can run as long as it needs.
• Browser calls are accepted only from your app's own address, https://<your-slug>.panop.ly, and only when the app slug the request names is that same app.

What it costs to run a model

Model prices come from the providers, not from Panoply — we take no cut of your model spend. Rates change often, so here is the current picture rather than a number written into this page:

Prices are per million tokens, in USD. Use them to estimate what an app will cost you to run: a chat-style app that sends a few thousand tokens per exchange costs fractions of a cent per message on a cheap model, and meaningfully more on a frontier one.

Choosing a model

If an app lets you pick a model, the trade-off is the usual one — cheaper and faster, or slower and more capable. Start on a cheap model and move up only if the output isn't good enough. The app's listing should say which models it supports.

If you'd rather not

An app that needs a key should say so in its description before you buy. Plenty of apps don't need one at all. See Find an app worth buying.