The receipt under every finished run, copied verbatim from a production run. Ask “what ran this week” and Bob adds them up.
Every AI employee product sells you credits, and every credit quietly carries two things: the platform doing the work, and the tokens the model burned doing it. The token half is marked up. It has to be, because the vendor is fronting the model bill and taking margin on it. That's a fine deal when you're starting out and want one bill with zero setup. It stops being fine the month your team gets real value out of the thing, because now your heaviest expense is someone else's markup on a commodity you could buy directly.
If your company already has an Anthropic or OpenAI account, and if you're reading this it probably does, you can buy tokens at list price, or better. So why are you buying them through an AI-employee vendor's credit meter?
BYOK: pay your provider for the brain, pay us for the desk
Bob's new BYOK tier is $349/month, self-serve. You paste your own Anthropic and OpenAI API keys into workspace settings, and from that moment Bob's runs execute on your keys:
- Tokens land on your provider bill, at whatever rate you've negotiated with Anthropic or OpenAI. No markup, no meter in the middle. You can watch the usage appear on your own provider dashboard.
- Platform credits drop to one fifth. Credits still exist, and they cover Bob's sandboxed computer, tool calls, and the platform around every run, but a BYOK run burns 20% of what the same run costs on managed credits, because the token bill is no longer inside them.
- Your catalog follows your keys. Paste an Anthropic key and the Claude models light up; paste an OpenAI key and GPT joins them, side by side in the same workspace. Bring one key or both.
- Everything else is unchanged. Approvals, schedules, spend caps, free reruns on mistakes. And every receipt says which key paid for the run, so finance never has to guess.
The tier includes a 20,000-credit monthly allowance, comfortably more run volume than our Business-plan workspaces typically use, since each credit goes five times as far, with ordinary top-up packs if you blow through it. Keys are stored encrypted, never logged, and leave our systems only in requests to your model provider. Each customer's keys are isolated in their own dedicated gateway partition, provisioned automatically the moment you paste them.
The math, honestly
On any credit-metered plan, ours included, the credit price has to cover tokens at retail plus margin. On BYOK the split is explicit:
| Credit-metered plan | Bob BYOK | |
|---|---|---|
| Tokens | Inside the credit price, marked up | On your provider bill, at your rate |
| Platform (sandbox, tools, receipts) | Inside the credit price | Credits at one fifth the managed burn |
| Subscription | Varies by volume | $349/month flat |
| Who sees the token bill | Nobody. It's blended | You, on your own dashboard |
The heavier your usage, the more this matters. A light workspace should stay on Flex: one bill, zero setup, $99/month. A workspace running Bob hard all day is exactly the workspace whose token spend deserves to be bought direct.
Coming from Viktor? Do this math before you renew
A lot of teams reaching us lately are coming from Viktor, and the pattern is consistent: they like having an AI employee, and they're startled by what a month of real usage costs in credits. That's not carelessness on their part. It's the pricing model. Viktor's public Team plan is $50/month for 20,000 shared workspace credits, every model call metered through them, and there is no bring-your-own-key option at any price on their public site. When the credits run low, the only lever is buying more credits.
With Bob, that lever exists: bring the OpenAI or Anthropic key your company already pays for, and stop routing your token spend through anyone's credit meter. You pay $349 for the platform (the sandboxed computer, 3,200+ connections, approvals, schedules, receipts, spend caps) and your provider for the tokens, at the price you already negotiated.
If you're weighing the switch, our full Bob vs Viktor comparison covers the rest: per-run receipts, hard spend caps, free reruns on mistakes, and, at the Enterprise tier, deployment inside your own VPC. For early switchers we'll match the credits remaining on your current commitment, and Bob himself will migrate your recurring tasks: describe them once and he rebuilds the schedules.
When BYOK is the wrong choice
Honesty cuts both ways. Stay on Flex if any of these are true: you don't have (or want) your own provider accounts; your usage is light enough that $99/month covers it; or you want exactly one bill for the whole thing. BYOK is for teams that already have provider relationships and enough volume that the token markup is real money. If that's you, the switch takes about two minutes: upgrade in settings, paste the keys, done. If a key ever stops working, runs pause with a clear message instead of quietly billing you. A workspace on its own keys never silently falls back to ours.