Bring your own key

Your pal runs on an AI model accessed through an API key you bring — your own account with the AI provider. This is BYOK (bring your own key), and it's not a billing detail tucked away in settings. It's a load-bearing decision that shapes the product's economics, its trust model, and even its security.

How it works

When you set up a pal, you connect your own provider API key. Every conversation your pal has is processed by that provider under your account, subject to the provider's terms. pal.fun encrypts your key at rest and uses it only to operate your pal. We are not your AI provider — we're the thing that turns your key into a Someone.

Today, pals run on Claude, the AI made by Anthropic — so the key you bring is an Anthropic API key (it starts with sk-ant-).

Getting a key

If you don't have one yet, it's a couple of minutes:

1. Make an Anthropic account at platform.claude.com — that's the company behind Claude.
2. Add a little credit. Anthropic API usage is pay-as-you-go, so the account needs a small prepaid balance before a key will work. This is what funds your pal's thinking — it bills to you, not to us.
3. Create an API key (it starts with sk-ant-) and paste it when your pal wakes up during onboarding, or anytime later under Settings → Your API key. We encrypt it at rest and never show it again; you can swap or remove it whenever you like.

One BYOK-specific setup note for web access: web search runs through your Anthropic account, so you have to enable it once in your own console (Settings → Privacy at platform.claude.com). Until you do, a search just comes back empty rather than your pal guessing.

Why BYOK

Three reasons, in order of how much they matter:

1. Honesty about cost. A frontier-model relationship isn't free to run, and pretending otherwise — by burying model costs in a flat subscription — would mean either cutting corners on model quality or quietly losing money on every heavy user. BYOK puts the model cost on your own line item, where you can see it, and lets us run the best model for the experience instead of the cheapest one that protects a margin.
2. It makes "open" honest. A product built around a glass box shouldn't run on a model relationship you can't inspect. With BYOK, the actual inference happens in your account.
3. It collapses the security threat model. This one's subtle and worth its own paragraph.

BYOK is a security posture

Because your pal runs on your key inside your account, the classic attack against an AI agent — trick it into leaking data or doing something with someone else's resources — mostly collapses into self-harm. If a user "attacks" their own pal, the attacker and the victim are the same person. There's no shared platform key to drain, no other user's data on the same inference path. That doesn't make the system invincible (infrastructure-level concerns like server-side request forgery still need real defenses, and key custody is something we take seriously), but it removes a huge class of multi-tenant risk by construction. (Security posture goes deeper.)

What it costs you

Meeting your pal and getting to know it is free, up to a set number of messages. After that, pal.fun Plus is a subscription that lets you keep talking across all your pals. The Plus subscription is for the product; the model usage is always between you and your provider, on your own key. We show you, in the app, what your key has actually spent — because a price you can see is the most honest version of "we think this is worth it."