> So it's also "bring your own keys" but then how do you monetize at all?
Why do you need to monetize? The original comment you replied to talked about making something for the world and sharing it. They said they didn’t want to maintain it, they didn’t want to be obligated to care for it. You can’t make that choice if people are paying you (or at least shouldn’t…).
I don’t understand the BYOx use case for a monetized product. If you’re BYO api, you’re essentially missing the opportunity to monetize a spread on API requests. The more a customer uses your product (because it’s good), the more you’d make. That’s the best case scenario because it means everyone is finding value.
Some people, myself included, are trying to earn a living creating software that helps people in some way. Just like any other physical or digital service, it’s fair to charge for a useful tool
> I don’t understand BYOx use case for monetised product
In my case, BYO keys turns out way cheaper for the end user. For instance my tool calls an LLM API. If I were to host the keys myself, I’d be charged $X for Y calls.
By getting the user to bring their own key, in my case the user easily fits into the free tier of the LLM (Gemini in my case) so the product costs me $0 to run, and I just charge a small service fee for me having created the product.
This allows me to keep building useful tools, some free (7 of 8 projects so far) and some paid (1 of 8)
BYOK frees application developers from being inference resellers and enables generous free tiers where you convert users because they love your app and want advanced functionality, not because it has a 7 day free trial then they can't use it anymore.
Also, subscriptions are a garbage business model from the user perspective, it's literally a dark pattern. They make sense for things with recurring costs to provide, but for instance, I should be able to buy a copy of Cursor and plug my key in and use it forever, and only shell out if I want upgrades. It's a subscription service because they're trying to bleed their users dry, and I'm sick of it.
Why do you need to monetize? The original comment you replied to talked about making something for the world and sharing it. They said they didn’t want to maintain it, they didn’t want to be obligated to care for it. You can’t make that choice if people are paying you (or at least shouldn’t…).
I don’t understand the BYOx use case for a monetized product. If you’re BYO api, you’re essentially missing the opportunity to monetize a spread on API requests. The more a customer uses your product (because it’s good), the more you’d make. That’s the best case scenario because it means everyone is finding value.