BYOAIK — Bring Your Own AI Key: a directory of AI tools that run on your own API key.

GPT Researcher

Autonomous agent that runs deep multi-source web research and writes cited reports using your own LLM provider.

Website Source code

Category:

Research Tools

Pricing:

Open Source

Open source:

Yes (Apache-2.0)

Self-hostable:

Yes

Local-first:

Yes

Platforms:

Web, Self-hosted, CLI, Library/SDK, Docker

AI providers (bring your own key):

OpenAI, Anthropic, Google Gemini, Azure OpenAI, Groq, Mistral, Cohere, Ollama, Hugging Face, Together AI, Fireworks, Custom / OpenAI-compatible

API key storage:

Configured by environment variable

Key risk level:

LOW

Trust score:

90/100

GPT Researcher is an open-source autonomous research agent that plans queries, scrapes and aggregates many web (and local) sources, and produces detailed, citation-backed reports. It is provider-agnostic: users bring their own LLM keys via environment variables or a .env file and select providers with provider:model strings across FAST_LLM/SMART_LLM/STRATEGIC_LLM. OpenAI-compatible and local endpoints are supported through OPENAI_BASE_URL/OPENAI_API_BASE (used for Ollama and other self-hosted models). It is self-hostable via pip, Docker, or its FastAPI server, with a web UI, CLI, and Python SDK usage. Web search uses a configurable retriever (Tavily by default, with its own BYO key). Apache-2.0 licensed, ~27.8k stars, and actively maintained (v3.5.0, May 2026).

How your API key is handled

Your API key is supplied via an environment variable or local config file. Requests are sent directly to the AI provider. Because it can be self-hosted, your key never has to touch a third-party backend.

Setup

Install the tool, set your provider API key as an environment variable (or in its config file), and pick a model.