TokelyTHE SHORT ANSWER
BYOK, or bring your own key, means a customer supplies credentials for their provider account. Managed access means your SaaS uses credentials and provider billing that your business controls. BYOK gives customers more direct ownership of provider spending; managed access usually makes onboarding and bundled pricing simpler.
Who pays under each approach?
In a BYOK design, inference is generally charged to the provider account behind the customer’s key. Your SaaS can still charge for its software, and an intermediary may charge separately for routing. BYOK does not necessarily mean free gateway usage. OpenRouter pricing is one example of a service that distinguishes BYOK terms from ordinary access.
With managed access, your business pays inference costs and recovers them through subscriptions, usage charges or credits. You need protection against unusually expensive customers and accidental runaway workflows.
When is BYOK useful?
It can suit customers that already have approved provider contracts, negotiated rates or separate departmental budgets. It also makes the provider bill more visible to the customer.
The tradeoff is onboarding. Customers must create credentials, choose the right permissions and keep their accounts funded. Your support team must distinguish application failures from problems in an account it does not control.
When are managed keys the better product choice?
Managed access works well when AI is part of a larger product and customers expect it to work immediately. A user should not need to understand model billing to generate a report or organize a document library.
Build a budget model before selling unlimited use. An illustrative $20 subscription with $3 of expected inference cost leaves room for other costs, but a customer generating $30 of inference creates a loss before support and infrastructure. Track the distribution, especially heavy users.
Does BYOK solve privacy automatically?
No. Key ownership and data handling are different questions. If your backend or gateway forwards prompts, it still participates in processing those prompts. Map the data path regardless of who pays the provider.
Customer keys should be encrypted at rest, accessible only to the services that need them, excluded from logs and revocable without affecting other tenants. Present connection health without revealing the secret again.
Can a SaaS offer both?
Yes, but make the active billing mode explicit. A customer’s BYOK request should not silently fall back to your paid account unless that behavior is part of a clearly agreed product policy. Otherwise an upstream account problem can become an unexpected cost for your business.
Tokely’s documented integration uses a Tokely-issued key and account balance. Its authentication guide says upstream provider keys are not accepted as Tokely credentials. Do not assume a BYOK feature from the fact that an API supports several model providers. Tokely authentication.
For managed inference, review Tokely’s pricing against your subscription economics and connect through the quickstart.