Stop paying markup on AI tools: bring your own API keys
Most AI tools charge you twice: once for the model, once for themselves. Your own key removes the second charge.
What you're actually paying for
When an AI product charges a monthly fee, part of that fee is the underlying model call — the request it makes to OpenAI, Anthropic, Google or another provider — and part is the tool's own margin. You rarely see the split. A $20/month plan might spend $3 of real model cost and keep $17, or it might cap your usage so tightly that you hit a wall halfway through the month.
The moment you use more than one such tool, you are paying several of these margins at once, on top of the model costs you can't see. That is the real reason a stack of AI subscriptions feels expensive out of proportion to what you actually run.
How bringing your own key changes the math
Every major provider — OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, xAI — will sell you API access directly, billed by usage. You create a key in their console, and from then on you pay the provider's raw per-token rate with no reseller in the middle.
A tool that lets you paste your own key steps out of the payment path entirely. The provider bills you directly for what you run, and the tool charges nothing per run because it never fronted the cost. You trade a fixed monthly markup for metered spend you can see line by line.
- You pay the provider's real rate, not a plan price set to cover heavy users.
- Light months cost almost nothing, instead of a flat fee whether you use it or not.
- Usage is visible and attributable, so you can tell which tool or task is expensive.
What to watch for
Bring-your-own-key is not free of trade-offs. A key is a credential: anyone who holds it can spend on your account, so it has to be stored properly — encrypted at rest, never shown back to the browser, and revocable the instant it leaks. Before you paste a key into any tool, check how it handles exactly that.
The other trade-off is setup. You have to create a key at each provider whose models you want to use. It's a few minutes per provider, once — and after that the key works everywhere the tool does.
Where Bizwax fits
Bizwax.ai is built around this model. You add your own provider keys once and every tool on the platform uses them, with the provider billing you directly — Bizwax charges no credits for those runs. Keys are encrypted with AES-256-GCM before storage and never returned to the browser; you see the last four characters and nothing more. If you'd rather not manage keys at all, there's a credits option that runs on the platform's key instead, and tells you when it does.
One account, your own keys, no per-run markup — and one Library that keeps everything you make.
Try it on your own keys
Bizwax.ai is in closed beta. Request access and we'll email you when you're in.
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