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Bring Your Own Keys (BYOK)

Bring Your Own Keys (BYOK) allows you to connect your own API keys from providers like OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, and others to Adaptive. This gives you maximum cost savings while still benefiting from Adaptive’s intelligent routing, caching, and reliability features.

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How BYOK Works

When you provide your own provider API keys, Adaptive uses them to make requests on your behalf instead of using our pooled API keys. This means:

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Pricing with BYOK

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Overhead-Only Pricing

When using your own API keys, you only pay Adaptive’s overhead:

• Input tokens: $0.10 per 1M tokens
• Output tokens: $0.20 per 1M tokens
• Semantic cache hits: 50% off (half the normal overhead)
• Prompt cache hits: Free

You do NOT pay Adaptive for the underlying model costs - those are billed directly by your provider (OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, etc.).

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Cost Example

Let’s say you make a request that uses:

• 100,000 input tokens
• 50,000 output tokens

Without BYOK (using Adaptive’s provider keys):

• Provider model cost (e.g., GPT-4): ~$1.25 (input) + ~$3.75 (output) = $5.00
• Adaptive overhead: $0.01 (input) +$0.01 (output) = $0.02
• Total charged by Adaptive: $5.02

With BYOK (using your own OpenAI key):

• Provider model cost: ~$5.00 (billed directly by OpenAI to you)
• Adaptive overhead: $0.01 (input) +$0.01 (output) = $0.02
• Total charged by Adaptive: $0.02
• Total charged by OpenAI: $5.00

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Benefits of BYOK

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Maximum Cost Savings

By paying only the overhead fee to Adaptive, you can save significantly on high-volume workloads. This is especially valuable for:

• High-traffic production applications
• Large-scale batch processing
• Development and testing environments
• Cost-sensitive projects

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Complete Control

When you use your own keys:

• Billing control: Direct relationship with providers for billing and invoicing
• Usage limits: Set your own rate limits and spending caps at the provider level
• Account isolation: Separate environments for dev, staging, and production
• Compliance: Meet specific compliance requirements that require direct provider relationships

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Privacy and Data Governance

• Your requests are authenticated with your own credentials
• No request pooling with other Adaptive users
• Direct audit trail with your provider
• Easier compliance with data residency requirements

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Setting Up BYOK

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Supported Providers

BYOK is currently supported for:

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Security and Best Practices

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Key Security

Best practices:

• Rotate keys regularly
• Use separate keys for dev/staging/production
• Monitor key usage in both Adaptive and provider dashboards
• Set spending limits at the provider level
• Revoke unused or compromised keys immediately

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Monitoring and Alerts

Set up monitoring for:

• Unexpected usage spikes
• Provider quota exhaustion
• Failed authentication attempts
• Cost threshold alerts

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Routing with Custom Keys

Even with BYOK enabled, Adaptive’s intelligent routing continues to work:

1. Model Selection: Adaptive analyzes your request complexity
2. Provider Selection: Routes to the optimal provider based on:
   • Your available custom keys
   • Model capabilities and performance
   • Current provider availability
   • Cost optimization
3. Fallback: If your custom key fails or hits quota, Adaptive can:
   • Fall back to other custom keys you’ve configured
   • Fall back to Adaptive’s pooled keys (at standard pricing)
   • Return graceful errors based on your configuration

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Frequently Asked Questions

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Getting Started

Ready to set up BYOK?

Configure Custom API Keys

Go to your project settings to add your provider API keys and start saving on overhead costs

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Need Help?