Bring your own keys (BYOK)

BYOK lets organizations connect their own official provider API keys to the gateway. Inference runs on your own provider quota, contract prices, and provider account — while you keep the unified API, smart routing, and automatic fallback.

What BYOK is

With BYOK, requests to a model are served with your own provider key against the provider's official endpoint. Inference charges appear on your own provider account, and request data stays within your existing provider agreements — useful where procurement or compliance requires a direct provider relationship.

Zero lock-in by design: the keys are yours, and your application talks to an OpenAI-compatible endpoint. You can point base_url back at the provider's official endpoint at any time.

How it works: one key for everything

• Your application keeps using a single BoostRail API key; models are selected with the model parameter of each request. BYOK does not add any new key to your code.
• Provider keys you store are backend inventory — your application never touches them. When a model you call is covered by one of your keys, the gateway uses your key against the provider's official endpoint and counts one request against your quota.
• Keys are shared at the organization level: multiple BoostRail API keys (per app or environment) share the same provider keys, monthly quota, and plan.
• Priority order: your keys (in order, rotating to the next on failure) → platform lines (enabled by default, requires wallet balance) → error only if both are unavailable.
• Both kinds of exhaustion switch over automatically: if your provider account runs out of credit, the request falls back to platform lines on the spot; if your monthly BYOK quota is used up, traffic runs on platform lines until the quota resets on the 1st of the month (UTC). No application changes either way.

Plans

BYOK is billed as prepaid monthly request allowances — no commission on your traffic, no card on file, and never a negative balance.

• Plan fees are deducted from the wallet balance — a one-off top-up is enough; no card subscription. Auto-renewal can be switched on or off at any time; when it is off the plan simply ends with the month.
• If the balance cannot cover renewal, the organization falls back to the Free plan automatically and can re-purchase after topping up.
• In-console notices are sent at 80% and 100% of the monthly quota. Over-quota requests switch to platform lines at the published platform prices — no hidden markup — and the quota resets on the 1st of the month (UTC).

Routing and fallback

• Prioritized: your keys always come first, tried in the order you set.
• Platform fallback (on by default): when all of your keys fail or are rate-limited, requests continue on the platform's paid lines — no platform-side key to apply for; a wallet balance is all that is needed.
• Always use: per provider, you can require your keys only, with no platform fallback — for strict data-boundary scenarios. When the keys are exhausted, requests fail instead of falling back.
• A small wallet balance works as fallback insurance — optional, and not required to use the free quota.

Supported providers

Anthropic, OpenAI, DeepSeek, Kimi (Moonshot), GLM (Zhipu), Qwen (Alibaba), Grok (xAI), Gemini (Google), and MiniMax — nine providers, with the in-console list as the source of truth as more open up. Each provider can hold multiple keys with priority ordering and automatic rotation.

Security and trust

• Keys are stored encrypted (AES-256-GCM); interfaces and logs only ever show the last four characters, never a full key.
• Rotate or delete keys at any time — deletion takes effect immediately.
• Control stays with you: revoke or cap a key in the provider's own console at any moment, effective instantly, with no need to trust any promise of ours.
• Keys are isolated per organization and used only for that organization's requests. Every call and every key change is audited.

Better together with platform lines

• Platform prices are typically below official list prices; the discount differs per model — the Models page in the console publishes live per-token prices.
• Models not covered by BYOK are available on platform lines with no setup.
• Why some models are not covered: BYOK routing requires the provider to be on the supported list and the model to have an official-endpoint mapping. Models sourced through aggregated channels, or from providers without a public official API, run on platform lines only — coverage grows with the catalog.