Managed vs BYOK: Choosing the Right UnforgeAPI Plan
A detailed comparison of our Managed and BYOK tiers. Understand the tradeoffs and pick the right plan for your use case.
Choosing the Right Plan
Choosing between Managed and BYOK (Bring Your Own Keys) is one of the first decisions you'll make with UnforgeAPI. Let's break down when each makes sense.
Managed: The "Just Works" Option
Best For:
- Teams who want to ship fast
- Prototypes and MVPs
- Developers who don't want to manage API keys
- Predictable budgeting needs
How It Works:
You get one API key. That's it. Behind the scenes, we handle:
- Groq LLM for fast, high-quality responses
- Tavily Search for web research capabilities
- Automatic failover if a provider has issues
- Usage optimization to maximize your quota
Pricing:
$29/month includes:
- 100K tokens/month for LLM
- 1,000 web searches/month
- All enterprise features
- Priority support
BYOK: Full Control
Best For:
- Enterprise teams with existing provider contracts
- High-volume use cases
- Teams with specific compliance requirements
- Cost optimization at scale
How It Works:
You provide your own API keys for Groq and Tavily. UnforgeAPI provides the routing, RAG pipeline, and enterprise features. You control (and pay for) the underlying providers.
Pricing:
$9/month for UnforgeAPI + your provider costs:
- Groq: ~$0.05 per 1M input tokens
- Tavily: ~$0.01 per search
Decision Framework
Choose Managed if:
- ✅ You're just getting started
- ✅ Volume is under 500K tokens/month
- ✅ You value simplicity over control
- ✅ You don't have existing provider contracts
- ✅ Predictable billing is important
Choose BYOK if:
- ✅ You process >500K tokens/month
- ✅ You have existing provider relationships
- ✅ You need specific models or providers
- ✅ Compliance requires owning the AI stack
- ✅ You want to optimize costs at scale
The Bottom Line
- Managed = Pay for convenience and predictability
- BYOK = Pay for control and optimization
Both give you the same UnforgeAPI features: hybrid RAG, Router Brain, enterprise features, and our dashboard. The difference is who manages the AI providers.
Most teams start Managed and graduate to BYOK as they scale. That's exactly how we designed it.