Why BYOK: the honest economics of AI visibility tools

Run one visibility scan — one question, asked across five AI engines — and the model APIs charge a few cents. That's the entire marginal cost of this product category. Now look at what most AI visibility tools charge per month, divide by the scans you get, and ask where the difference goes.

It goes into reselling. Most tools sit between you and the model providers: they buy tokens at cost, meter them back to you inside a subscription, and price the package at whatever the category leader charges. The markup isn't paying for better data — the answers come from the same five engines either way. It's paying for the middleman position itself.

BYOK skips the position

BYOK — bring your own key — means AEO Explorer never sells you tokens. You connect your own API key (one OpenRouter key covers every model, or direct keys per provider), and scans run on it at the providers' actual rates. You can read those rates on their pricing pages; a typical scan costs single-digit cents. We charge for the software: the tracking, the detection, the history, the reports.

That's why the pricing looks the way it does — a free hosted tier with 50 scans a month, and a one-time $79 license if you'd rather run the whole thing on your own infrastructure. With no token margin to defend, there's no reason to meter you into a subscription.

What about the keys themselves?

A BYOK product lives or dies on key handling, so the rules are strict and boring:

• Keys are encrypted at rest (AES-256-GCM) and decrypted only server-side, per scan.
• The browser never sees a key again after you save it — the UI gets a yes/no "key connected" flag, nothing else.
• Every AI call is metered per workspace — you can see what ran, on which model, and what it cost, instead of trusting a vague "credits" balance.
• Self-hosted, all of this happens on your infrastructure. Your keys never touch ours.

The trade

BYOK asks one thing of you: two minutes to create an API key. In exchange you get provider prices with no markup, spend you can audit line by line, and a tool with no incentive to inflate your scan count. For a category whose whole job is telling you the truth about your visibility, the pricing being honest too seems like the least it can do.