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

LLM

CLI tool and Python library for accessing many LLMs with your own API keys

Website Source code

Category:

Developer Infrastructure

Pricing:

Open Source

Open source:

Yes (Apache-2.0)

Self-hostable:

Yes

Local-first:

Yes

Platforms:

CLI, Library/SDK, Self-hosted, Docker

AI providers (bring your own key):

OpenAI, Anthropic, Google Gemini, OpenRouter, Mistral, Groq, Ollama, Custom / OpenAI-compatible

API key storage:

Configured by environment variable

Key risk level:

LOW

Trust score:

94/100

LLM is an open-source command-line tool and Python library by Simon Willison for interacting with OpenAI, Anthropic Claude, Google Gemini, Llama and dozens of other large language models. It is BYOK by design: users store their own provider API keys with commands like `llm keys set openai` or `llm keys set anthropic` (saved locally in keys.json), and an extensive plugin system (llm-anthropic, llm-gemini, llm-mistral, llm-openrouter, llm-groq, llm-ollama, and more) lets users add their own keys for additional providers or point at local/self-hosted models. OpenAI-compatible endpoints with a custom base URL are supported via an extra-openai-models.yaml config, enabling any OpenAI-API-compatible service (e.g. LocalAI, OpenRouter). It works as both a CLI and a Python SDK and supports prompts, chat, embeddings, and logging to SQLite.

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.