BYOK vs managed credits: why I let you bring your own key

Open the pricing page of almost any interview AI tool and you will find the same machine: credits. You buy a bucket of minutes or messages, you burn through it, you buy more. It is a beautiful business model. It is just not always a good deal for you.

SideSense takes the other path. You can run local models for free, or bring your own key from a provider you already use. Let me explain the trade-off honestly, including where managed credits genuinely make sense.

What managed credits really cost

With managed credits, the tool sits between you and the model and marks up every call. That markup is fine in principle, companies need revenue, but it has side effects. You watch a meter during the exact moment you should be focused on the interview. You pay per use even when a local model would have done the job for free. And your data flows through their server to reach the model, because that is how they meter it.

The case for bring your own key

Bring your own key flips all three. You pay the provider directly at their rate, with no middle markup. There is no meter to watch, because you manage the key. And your requests go from your machine to the provider you chose, not through a vendor in between.

Better still, you do not need a key at all for the free path. Install Ollama and run models locally at no cost. The key is there for when you want a bigger hosted model, on your terms.

When managed credits are actually fine

I want to be fair. Managed credits are genuinely convenient. If you never want to touch an API key, never want to install anything, and are happy to pay a premium for zero setup, a credit model is the easy button, and there is nothing wrong with choosing it.

My bet is just that most people, once they see the numbers and care about their data, would rather own the key. So I built for them first, and left the easy button as a later option, not the only one.