What "bring your own key" actually buys you
Three different things, and people usually want one of them:
- Nothing leaves your machine. Point Booost at a local Ollama model and the prompts, the drafts and your contacts' details never cross your network card. There is no other setting in this category that does that.
- Your own AI bill, at your own rates. If you already have credit with a provider, or a negotiated rate, or a model you trust, you keep it.
- Your choice of model. Not the one we picked.
The trade is that you configure it: a key, a provider, a model name. Pro exists for the people who would rather not — same features, our AI, no configuration, no separate bill.
The twenty providers
Anthropic · Google · Mistral · Groq · Cerebras · SambaNova · NVIDIA · Fireworks · Together · DeepInfra · Hugging Face · OpenRouter · Perplexity · Cloudflare · Scaleway · Alibaba · SiliconFlow · Hyperbolic · Z.ai · Ollama
OpenRouter is worth naming twice, because through it a single key reaches most of the rest — it is the shortest path from "I have no AI account" to "everything works".
Ollama: the one that changes the argument
With Ollama the model runs on your computer. Not on a server we operate, not on a provider's, not encrypted-in-transit-to-somewhere — nowhere. Booost sends the prompt to localhost and reads the answer back.
That makes Basic the honest answer to a question we get from regulated industries and from people who simply do not want to feed a model: can I use an AI writing assistant where no text ever leaves my machine? Yes, and it is the cheaper edition, not the more expensive one.
The cost is the usual one for local models — you need a machine that can run them, and a 7-billion-parameter model on a laptop writes worse than a frontier model in a data centre. That is a real trade and only you can judge it.
What runs on your key
On Basic, all of it: writing posts, drafting comments, drafting inbox replies, the voice grounding from your interview, scheduling and publishing, and the parody mode.
What Basic does not get is not a smaller AI — it is the set of objects built on top of the managed tier: the source-driven content factory (RSS, Reddit, web search, HTTP), the quality gates (fact-check, faithfulness, epistemic, anti-cringe) and the engagement intelligence. Those are Pro. The boundary is written out in full on the pricing page.
Switching
It is a dropdown, not a migration. Move Basic → Pro and the managed AI takes over immediately; move Pro → Basic and it hands back to your key. There is no separate download and no reinstall — one application, and the subscription decides what it does.
You can also be on Pro and still point specific work at your own key. Paying for the managed tier does not lock the door on the other one.
Where the keys live
On your machine, in the local database, used locally. They are not synced to us, and they are not in the schedule snapshot or the diagnostics — see what actually leaves your machine for the complete list.
Which editions have it
All three. Community runs on your own key too — that is precisely how a free edition stays free for us to operate. Basic is your key with the whole product around it; Pro adds ours.
Questions this page gets asked
Do I need a key to try Booost? For the 7-day trial on Pro, no — the managed AI is included. Basic needs a key from day one.
Which provider do you recommend? OpenRouter if you want one key for everything, Anthropic or Google direct if you already have an account, Ollama if the point is that nothing leaves.
Does Booost mark up my AI usage? There is nothing to mark up: on Basic you pay your provider directly and we never see the bill.
Can I use a model you have never heard of? If the provider is in the list above and the model name is valid, yes.
Is my key sent to your servers? No. See security.