Bring your own AI key

Adding your own OpenAI, Anthropic, Google or OpenRouter key routes your generations through your own provider account instead of ours, which means they spend no credits and are not capped by your balance — your provider bills you directly. A rejected key fails the run outright rather than falling back to the platform key, because a silent fallback would spend credits on a request you asked to run elsewhere.

What it changes

	Platform key (default)	Your own key
Who pays	Your Reply Pilots credits	Your provider account, directly
Ceiling	Your monthly allowance	Whatever your provider allows
Model choice	The installation's configured model	You pick, within your provider's range
Recorded cost	Shown in credits	Blank — your provider has the figure
Where the request is made	Our server	Our server

That last row does not change. Requests are always made server-side; your key never travels to the extension and is never used from your browser.

Adding a key

Open Settings → your own AI key in the dashboard.
Choose the provider: OpenAI, Anthropic, Google or OpenRouter.
Paste the key.
Pick the model you want your generations to run on.
Save.

From that point your generations run on your account.

Model choice

Choosing your own model is the one place where the usual arrangement is inverted.

Normally the model is an installation-wide setting, chosen by whoever administers it, so nobody is picking a model on someone else's budget. When you are paying your provider directly that reasoning does not apply, so the choice is yours.

Note that each provider expects a different request shape, so the available models and their exact behaviour follow whichever provider your key belongs to.

A rejected key does not fall back

If your key is rejected — revoked, out of quota, wrong provider selected — the run fails and tells you.

It deliberately does not quietly fall back to the platform key. A fallback would spend your credits on a request you explicitly asked to run on your own account, which is the wrong outcome even though it looks more forgiving in the moment.

The fix: correct the key, or remove it to go back to the platform key.

Storage

Keys are encrypted at rest. They are never sent to the extension, never exposed to the page you are on, and never included in any export.

Removing a key deletes it. Your generations continue on the platform key and start spending credits again.

When it is worth it

Situation	Worth it?
Heavy volume, existing provider account	Yes — no ceiling, and you already have the billing set up
You need a specific model	Yes — it is the only way to choose
Your organisation requires its own provider contract	Yes
Occasional use	Usually not — the allowance covers it with less to manage
You want to avoid the subscription entirely	No — an account is still required

Limits

It does not remove the need for an account. Reply Pilots is still the client, the dashboard and the settings; the key changes who bills you for the generation.
Your provider's limits apply. Rate limits and quotas are theirs, and their errors surface as failed runs.
Credit-based features still read your balance for anything that is not a generation on your key.
No cost figure is recorded against runs on your key. Your provider's dashboard has it.

Credits and usageWhat a credit is, which actions spend one, and what happens when you run out.
Privacy and dataWhat it reads, when, where that goes — and the one thing it reads without you pressing anything.
TroubleshootingThe button is missing, it says signed out, the draft looks wrong — causes in the order they occur.

More on this on the blog: Pricing articles