Why we ask you to bring your own API key
Reselling tokens would be easier to sell and worse for you. The tradeoffs of bring-your-own-key, stated plainly.
Most AI products buy tokens wholesale and sell them back to you inside a subscription. It is a clean business model and it has one structural problem: the vendor now profits from your usage, and prices the plan around the heaviest user they can tolerate.
What bringing your own key changes
You connect your own Anthropic, OpenAI or Google account. That provider bills you directly for exactly what you used, at their published rate, with no markup from us. Our price stays flat because our marginal cost per run is close to zero.
It also means you choose the model. If you want the most capable model for a research run and a cheap one for name generation, that is your call, not a tier we sell you.
The honest downsides
It is more setup. You need an account with a provider and a key in hand before the first live run. We soften that with safe preview, which runs the entire flow without calling a provider, so you can see what the product does before signing up for anything.
It also means your key passes through our server to reach the provider. It is used for the request and discarded, never written to our database — but that is a trust claim, and you should hold us to it. If you ask the browser to remember your key, it goes into local storage unencrypted, which we say on the screen where you tick the box.
Where the money goes
A research run is typically a few cents at your provider. Our subscription pays for the parts that are not tokens: registry verification, storage for your brand assets, the repository build, and keeping all of it working.
AppCrafter is free for one app, with your own AI key.
Try it