Bring your own OpenRouter key

The free tier is for evaluation. The product is for BYOK. Here's why and how.

Why BYOK

Inference is a commodity. We don't believe in marking up tokens you could buy yourself. Instead, we charge for the aggregation, the trendlines, and the insights — the part that's actually hard to build.

When you bring your own OpenRouter key:

• Full platform coverage — all four LLMs (ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, Perplexity) with the strongest models available
• No scan caps — run as many scans as your OpenRouter budget allows
• No model gating — we don't downgrade you to cheap models
• Full sentiment + position + context-type extraction — the second-pass LLM extractor that the free tier skips
• Per-scan cost surface + full workspace Cost page — every response shows the USD cost. Go to Settings → Cost (supports ?day=YYYY-MM-DD) for breakdowns by member, lane (scans vs extractions vs insights), billing case, and CSV export. See the repo root COST.md for operator commands.

The shared-key free tier (no BYOK) has strict limits — see Free tier limits for the exact gates.

How to get an OpenRouter key

1. Go to openrouter.ai and sign up
2. Add credit to your account (start with $10 — that's hundreds of scans across all four platforms)
3. Open Keys in the OpenRouter dashboard and create a new API key
4. Copy it (starts with sk-or-v1-…)

OpenRouter is a single API gateway that fronts every major LLM provider. One key, one bill, one rate limit — instead of managing keys with OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, and Perplexity separately.

Add the key to BrandBanta

1. In your workspace, open Settings → API keys
2. Paste your OpenRouter key
3. Click Test to verify it works
4. Save

Your key is encrypted at rest with AES-256-GCM and only decrypted inside scan execution. We never log it. We never expose it in client-side code. Inngest's durable event store never sees it — the worker re-resolves the key fresh per scan.

Verifying BYOK is active

After saving the key, run any scan. Look at the per-scan detail page — the cost line at the top will show real USD spent on each LLM call. If you see $0.0000 across the board, the scan ran on our shared key (gated, regex-only mention detection).

The dashboard also shows a "Spent (30d)" card under your KPIs once BYOK is active.

Switching back or revoking

To stop using BYOK and fall back to the free tier:

1. Settings → API keys
2. Revoke the saved key

Your workspace switches back to the shared key on the next scan. Future scans count against your free-tier monthly cap.

To rotate to a new key, paste the new one — it replaces the old one cleanly.

Cost expectations

Real numbers from a typical workspace:

At Pro-tier usage (~500 scans/month) you'll typically spend $5–$15/month on OpenRouter — much less than the $49/month we charge for the platform.

See also

• Free tier limits — what the shared key caps look like
• Pricing tiers — what BrandBanta charges for, on top of your inference bill
• How it works — the methodology behind every scan