Bring Your Own Key BYOK is The Best Way to use AI

[devise]

Probably like a lot of you I've been experimenting with AI tools.

It gets expensive quickly though. Everyone wants $50 a month for a simple ChatGPT wrapper. What's the solution to this?

Bring Your Own Key (BYOK). I've recently learned how much more cost effective it is to buy OpenAI credits directly and use these.

The best part? You get much better output at a lower cost.

These AI writers and other image generation tools have insane markups.

OpenAI isn't the only AI model, Claude is another I've been using.

If you want to save money I recommend not overpaying for these AI wrappers. Go direct and buy the AI credits directly.

Haven't played with Gemini Pro but that is another AI where I'd recommend going direct with.

 

[DanielB]

What exactly do you mean by a BYOK tool? Just using chat gpt (or Claude) natively?

 

[bernard]

https://openrouter.ai/ is your solution.

 

[devise]

Yes, I use tools such as TypingMind and BYOK to it.

It's much less expensive to buy credits directly and use these AI models with BYOK tools.

Most of the the AI writers and image generators are just OpenAI wrappers charging a huge markup.

What exactly do you mean by a BYOK tool? Just using chat gpt (or Claude) natively?

 

[Darth]

TypingMind looks interesting - thanks.

And yes, 100% bring your own key is the way to go, cheaper, more control, no restrictions.

 

[MrX]

BYOK is definitely the way to go.

Nocode AI writing - One of the quickest ways to get up and running once you have an api key is to go the nocode route with something like make_com. I've setup automations to write articles, summaries and social media posts. You get enough free credits each month that it's free for anything you need done if it's just a handful of projects. A lot of people seem to prefer using it alongside airtable for their datastore but I find that a google sheet is enough for me. It lets me autopost to websites and to socials.

Program your own - If you're programming savvy then you can write your own chat client and AI writer in python. There are tutorials on YT that I used to sort out the API connection part. This gives you more flexibility and you can even run your own in-house API for automating a lot of things. I run a chat client right from the commandline but there are also guis already built that you can use for free. Some are desktop based like ollama (this one I'm getting ready to test out) and some run in your browser.

Images - If you want to generate images with more control that what you get inside of chatgpt then you can setup stable diffusion. Use it locally if you have a decent computer. Personally I started using sagemaker, which gives you 4hrs of gpu usage on a daily basis for free. You can auto import models from civitai.