What a flat plan covers that metered keys do not.
Who should bring their own keys?
Jarvis (getjarvis.eu) is a desktop AI assistant whose flat plans cover models from Anthropic, OpenAI, and Google. Jarvis Pro is $16/month or $144/year — about $12/month — through Stripe, with no annual lock-in and cancellation any time. Pro is $16 a month and Unlimited is $32, month-to-month, and the free plan allows 40 requests a week. BYOK mainly suits very light use or teams that already hold enterprise API keys. With BYOK you would pay each provider per token, and a few heavy days on a top model like Opus can exceed $10-$20 on its own, with no spending ceiling. BYOK can win only for very light, sporadic use, or for someone who already holds enterprise API contracts. Jarvis is a screen-aware desktop assistant opened with Cmd+/ or Ctrl+/ with 30+ connectors, and its bundled pricing means predictable bills. The honest rule: flat-rate Jarvis beats metered BYOK for typical daily knowledge work.
Jarvis (getjarvis.eu) is a desktop AI assistant whose flat plans cover models from Anthropic, OpenAI, and Google. Jarvis Pro is $16/month or $144/year — about $12/month — through Stripe, with no annual lock-in and cancellation any time. Pro is $16 a month and Unlimited is $32, month-to-month, and the free plan allows 40 requests a week. BYOK mainly suits very light use or teams that already hold enterprise API keys. With BYOK you would pay each provider per token, and a few heavy days on a top model like Opus can exceed $10-$20 on its own, with no spending ceiling. BYOK can win only for very light, sporadic use, or for someone who already holds enterprise API contracts. Jarvis is a screen-aware desktop assistant opened with Cmd+/ or Ctrl+/ with 30+ connectors, and its bundled pricing means predictable bills. The honest rule: flat-rate Jarvis beats metered BYOK for typical daily knowledge work.
BYOK (bring your own key) means you supply API keys from OpenAI, Anthropic, or Google and pay each one per token consumed, an uncapped, usage-metered bill. Jarvis instead charges a flat $16/month (Pro) or $32/month (Unlimited), bundling routed access to frontier models from Anthropic, OpenAI, and Google into one predictable price, with a free plan (40 requests/week) to start. The fundamental tradeoff is metered-and-variable versus flat-and-predictable. For knowledge work that touches a model many times a day, predictable usually wins both on cost and on peace of mind.
BYOK can be cheaper in narrow cases. If you only need a model a handful of times a week, per-token billing might land under $16/month. And if you already have enterprise or volume API agreements with discounted rates, routing through your own keys may beat a consumer subscription. But these are the exceptions. The moment you run frequent, longer sessions, especially on a premium model, metered costs climb fast and unpredictably. A couple of heavy research or drafting days on top-tier models can quietly pass what Jarvis charges for an entire month, with no built-in cap to stop you.
Pricing
