Bring Your Own Key (BYOK) and Pricing

Chatsistant operates on a “pay as you go” basis. Rather than having Message Credits (MCs) baked into existing subscriptions, you buy them separately via add-ons or connect your own AI API keys to enjoy unlimited usage.

If you use your own AI API keys, then after you exhaust all MCs inside your Chatsistant account, additional AI usage will be charged against your own API keys.

Setting up BYOK

To set up your own API key, you will first need to register on the AI provider’s website. Chatsistant currently supports large language models (LLMs) from OpenAI, Anthropic, and Google. In the future, we plan to expand our list of supported models, potentially incorporating open-source and fine-tuned ones.

Provider-specific instructions

OpenAI (GPT models)- https://platform.openai.com/account/api-keys
Anthropic (Claude models) - https://console.anthropic.com/settings/keys
Google (Gemini models) - https://ai.google.dev/gemini-api/docs/api-key

After you obtain your API key, store it in a private and secure location. Chatsistant recommends that you use a separate API key for each of your BYOK applications (including Chatsistant), and to never share your API key with anyone else.

Next, log in to Chatsistant and go to the top right corner of the UI. Click the “Profile” icon the bring up a dropdown menu.

Then, click “Account”. In the “AI API Key” section, pick your AI provider and paste your API key. Then click “Add”. Please note that this is not the “Chatsistant API keys” section which is used to generate Chatsistant API keys.

You should be all set.

If this is the first time you create an API key with a provider, there is a good chance that your key may be rate and feature limited. For example, as of November 1, 2024, all new API keys registered with new OpenAI accounts are prohibited from running GPT-4o model series. To lift this restriction, you may need to add $5 credt and provide verified billing information within your OpenAI account. Different providers may have different policies regarding account verification.

Budgeting for AI usage

In general, using your own API key will be more cost efficient than purchasing MC add-ons directly. To help you estimate costs associated with running your BYOK account, we provide the following references.

LLM providers change their pricing from time to time, so the information we provide may not always be up-to-date. For latest information on pricing, please visit:

OpenAI (GPT models): https://openai.com/pricing
Anthropic (Claude models): https://www.anthropic.com/pricing#anthropic-api
Google (Gemini models): https://ai.google.dev/pricing#1\_5flash

The simplest estimate you can use is this:

Each Message Credit costs ~$0.0032 USD

For example, GPT-4-1106-4k uses 20 MCs per query. To estimate the cost in USD, multiply $0.0032 \* 20 =$ 0.064 USD.

This is a very rough estimate. Actual spend may be around +/- 20% of the estimated number. This is because LLM usage is measured based on “tokens”, and input vs. output tokens cost different amounts even for the same LLM. To understand tokens, we refer you to this article: https://help.openai.com/en/articles/4936856-what-are-tokens-and-how-to-count-them.

There are many parts to a LLM query. At a high level, they can be broken down into:

Input:

System prompt and metadata
User-defined base prompt
Variables and definitions
Conversation label definitions
Function metadata and descriptions
Function parameters
Function response
Static RAG context
Conversation memory

Output:

Text response
Response metadata

OpenAI pricing breakdown

Chatsistant supports a variety of OpenAI LLMs, as well as different versions of the same LLM with custom token limit cutoffs. To help you budget for your usage, we provide a summary based on our default split of reserved input vs. output tokens. Please refer to the following table (all $ are in USD). Please note that this generally represents an upper limit since not all input / output tokens in the reservation window are used every single LLM query.

Model	Reserved for Input	Reserved for Output	Cost / Input Token	Cost / Output Token	Total Cost per Query
GPT-3.5	2800	1200	0.0000005	0.0000015	0.0032
GPT-3.5-16k	13600	2400	0.0000005	0.0000015	0.0104
GPT-4o-mini-1k	800	200	0.00000015	0.0000006	0.00024
GPT-4o-mini-2k	1600	400	0.00000015	0.0000006	0.00048
GPT-4o-mini-4k	2800	1200	0.00000015	0.0000006	0.00114
GPT-4o-mini-8k	5600	2400	0.00000015	0.0000006	0.00228
GPT-4o-mini-16k	12800	3200	0.00000015	0.0000006	0.00384
GPT-4o-mini-32k	28000	4000	0.00000015	0.0000006	0.0066
GPT-4o-mini-64k	60000	4000	0.00000015	0.0000006	0.0114
GPT-4o-1k	800	200	0.0000025	0.00001	0.004
GPT-4o-2k	1600	400	0.0000025	0.00001	0.008
GPT-4o-4k	2800	1200	0.0000025	0.00001	0.019
GPT-4o-8k	5600	2400	0.0000025	0.00001	0.038
GPT-4o-16k	12800	3200	0.0000025	0.00001	0.064
GPT-4o-32k	28000	4000	0.0000025	0.00001	0.11
GPT-4o-64k	60000	4000	0.0000025	0.00001	0.19
GPT-4-1106-1k	800	200	0.00001	0.00003	0.014
GPT-4-1106-2k	1600	400	0.00001	0.00003	0.028
GPT-4-1106-4k	2800	1200	0.00001	0.00003	0.064
GPT-4-0125-8k	5600	2400	0.00001	0.00003	0.128
GPT-4-1106-16k	12800	3200	0.00001	0.00003	0.224
GPT-4-1106-32k	28000	4000	0.00001	0.00003	0.4
GPT-4-1106-64k	60000	4000	0.00001	0.00003	0.72

Explore Our Subscription Pricing Below

All plans, including the free trial, offer unlimited message credits (MCs) with your own OpenAI API key.

Free Trial

Free 30-Day
Our Free 30-Day Trial is your opportunity to explore the advanced features and benefits of our platform, commitment-free.

2 Chatbots
4 AI Agents
Storage: 50MB
Unlimited Message Credits via User’s Own OpenAI API Key + Free 50 Message Credits
Test advanced features
GPT-3.5 | GPT-4 | GPT-4o
Website/App Embedding

Get started