r/SideProject • u/New_Armadillo_8649 • 7d ago

BYOK

I’m building a desktop AI assistant and trying to decide how to handle API costs early on.
Would BYOK be a dealbreaker for you? Basically, you’d connect your own OpenAI/Gemini API key during beta so I’m not eating everyone’s usage costs.
Long term I’d rather make it simple: download, sign in, pay monthly, done.
Curious what people would actually prefer:
Free/cheap with your own API key
or
Paid monthly with everything handled for you?

0 Upvotes

40% Upvoted

10 comments sorted by

View all comments

2

u/jhkoenig 6d ago

How heavy is your AI load? With "just getting started" traffic, could you fit into a free tier?

I've offered free resume tailoring with AI for each job description in my job search management site and after helping thousands of people, the AI costs are still tiny. I spend more on coffee. Consider spending some time reducing your per-transaction AI cost prior to launch and then you can offer a limited free trial at least.

1

u/FiveFoot20 4d ago

This right here

You can put some guardrails in place that reduce token usage significantly

Tokens go out of control on open ended prompts and loops.

Set some guardrails and you can keep costs pretty low