Bring your own provider key

Your organization can route inference through its own OpenAI, Anthropic or Azure API keys, or an AWS Bedrock workload role. You still call the gateway with a marketplace key; the provider credential stays stored with the connection, encrypted, and the provider bills you directly. The marketplace charges nothing for BYOK inference. Set it up on Console → Provider connections or with the API below.

Set up in the console

1. 01
   Sign in, open /console/byok, and select your organization.
2. 02
   Click Add connection. Name it, choose a provider, enter its credential and add exact model IDs. Azure also needs a resource and a deployment mapping. Bedrock is selectable only when your organization has an operator-approved role. The provider and model list are fixed after saving; create a new connection if they change.
3. 03
   Click Save and validate. If validation fails, the pending connection remains available; rotate its credential or retry validation instead of creating a duplicate.
4. 04
   Choose an existing provider account's limits, or enter RPM, TPM, concurrency and headroom for a new account. Credentials for the same account should share the same pool or parent. A connection with no pool cannot serve requests.
5. 05
   Create a new platform key or select an existing one. A new BYOK key is created and bound in one transaction before it is returned. The page warns before it replaces an existing key's connection or key-level policy; an organization or workspace policy still applies.
6. 06
   Copy the new platform key once and use the generated request example. The optional Send test request sends "Reply OK" with at most 8 output tokens; it uses provider quota and may incur a small provider charge.

The connection cards support validation, shared-account limit edits, rotation, disable and permanent deletion. Viewers can inspect metadata; owners and admins make changes. Provider secrets are never returned. A disabled connection needs rotation and successful validation to become active again. Deleted connections cannot be restored.

Workspaces and principals provisioned through the identity API can be selected when issuing a key. The console preserves their limits and restrictions.

API setup

1. 01

   Sign in to the console and create a virtual key. No marketplace credit is required for BYOK inference.

2. 02

   Send POST /api/connections on the site origin, with JSON:

   jsoncopy

   {"profile":"openai","models":["your-exact-provider-model-id"],"api_key":"YOUR_PROVIDER_KEY"}

   Basic profiles are openai and anthropic; Azure and policy setup adds an azure profile with mandatory deployment mapping, and Bedrock a bedrock profile whose workload_role replaces api_key. Supply 1–100 exact model IDs, without wildcards. An optional name labels the connection. The response is 201 with connection_id and status: "pending"; it never returns the key.

3. 03

   Send POST /api/connections/{connection_id}/validate with {}. A successful result has valid: true, status: "active". For API-key profiles, validation performs one authenticated model-list GET, with a ten-second timeout and no generated tokens. It checks credential access to that endpoint; it does not verify access to every declared model or reserve capacity.

4. 04

   Send POST /api/connections/{connection_id}/bind with {"key_id":"YOUR_VIRTUAL_KEY_UUID"}. This binds an existing, enabled virtual key in the same org to an active connection. Allow five seconds for a previously used house key to switch, or use a fresh virtual key.

5. 05

   Declare a quota pool for the provider account and assign the connection to it. A route with no declared pool is refused with a 503. Credentials for the same account must share the appropriate pool or parent.

6. 06

   Use the virtual key with /v1/chat/completions or /v1/messages. Both buyer formats and streaming work with either profile, subject to the existing wire compatibility limits.

Management requires the tm_s session cookie. Mutations also require Content-Type: application/json and an Origin header equal to https://app.routerplus.com. Same-origin browser fetch supplies the cookie and Origin automatically. A CLI client must supply both securely; avoid putting cookies or provider keys in shell history. An inference bearer key cannot manage connections. Viewers can read; owners and admins can write.

Management operations

Disabled connections can be restored by rotating and validating a new credential. Deleted connections cannot be restored. Rotation temporarily stops new inference until validation succeeds. Profile and allowed-model changes require a new connection and an explicit rebind. There is no implicit unbind-to-house operation. An explicit house-only policy is available through the policy API. No secret suffix, ciphertext, envelope, or upstream validation body is exposed in management responses.

Inference behavior

A bound key can use only its connection's exact models. It never silently falls back to marketplace supply. /v1/models lists that connection's models; Anthropic token counting uses the same connection and is available only for an Anthropic profile. Unavailable, disabled, or deleted bindings produce 404 model_unavailable; database/decryption failures produce 503 gateway_error. An invalid virtual key still produces 401 auth.

BYOK inference is metered and durably audited. Marketplace charges and marketplace provider payables are zero: the attempt's billing_source is byok, its cost_usd is 0, and its inference cost is recorded as unknown (null), since the marketplace does not price your account. The provider still bills your account. Marketplace spend caps do not limit that external bill; virtual-key RPM enforcement and your organization's token and concurrency limits still apply, including to token counting. A policy with house fallback is the one case a BYOK key spends credit: the house attempt reserves and is charged like any house call.

Image generation works through an openai connection: list the exact image model ids you will send (matching is literal), and the render is billed by OpenAI to your own account, so usage.cost is 0. See POST /v1/images/generations.

New calls reflect credential disable/rotation within five seconds; existing upstream calls and streams may finish on their original version. When the configuration database is unreachable, previously verified authority may serve for a bounded time; see limits and outage behavior. OpenAI, Anthropic and configured Azure v1 public destinations are supported; redirects are refused. Bedrock uses the separately documented workload-role profile. No arbitrary endpoint or automatic private-link, residency or retention guarantee is included. Routing policies add explicit ordering, filtering and funding controls. Request-level credentials or destinations (api_key, base_url and the like) return 400.

Provider HTTP error bodies are never relayed, so an echoed credential cannot leak. Validation and token-count calls are not inference ledger attempts; validation has a content-free management audit event. Shared limits and pilot fairness are described in the admission guide.

Related

Use workspaces and principals for scoped keys and trusted end-user limits. The Bedrock workload-role profile adds native regional Claude inference; its write-only workload_role replaces api_key. The connection lifecycle, quota-pool requirement and free BYOK economics are the same for every profile.