Bring Your Own Key (BYOK)

What BYOK is

BYOK (Bring Your Own Key) lets you supply your own API key for the underlying model provider — Anthropic (Claude), OpenAI (ChatGPT), or others — so AI inference runs through your own account rather than Lodestar's shared pools.

This gives you full control over model costs, usage limits, and data handling at the inference layer.

How keys are stored

Your API key is encrypted per user using a key derived from your account. Lodestar cannot read your provider key in plaintext — it is only ever decrypted at the moment of an API call and is never logged or stored in our systems unencrypted.

Setting up BYOK

Go to Settings → AI Provider → Bring Your Own Key. Select your provider, paste your API key, and save. Lodestar will validate the key and switch your account to BYOK mode.

What changes in BYOK mode

In BYOK mode, AI token usage is billed directly to your provider account rather than counted against your Lodestar token pools. You are responsible for any costs incurred with your provider.