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

SurfSense

Open-source, privacy-focused NotebookLM / Perplexity / Glean alternative that connects any LLM to your docs and external sources.

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, Docker

AI providers (bring your own key):

OpenAI, Anthropic, Google Gemini, Groq, DeepSeek, Ollama, Custom / OpenAI-compatible

API key storage:

User controls deployment

Key risk level:

LOW

Trust score:

90/100

SurfSense is a self-hostable, open-source research and knowledge assistant positioned as a private alternative to NotebookLM, Perplexity, and Glean. It connects your own LLM to internal documents and external sources (search engines like Tavily/LinkUp/SearxNG, plus Slack, Notion, Linear, Jira, Confluence, GitHub, YouTube, Google Drive and more) and answers with cited hybrid (semantic + full-text) search, generating reports, podcasts, and chats over your knowledge base. It is BYOK by design: the dashboard lets users create custom LLM configurations by entering their own API credentials, selecting models, and defining custom API base URLs, with all calls routed through LiteLLM for 100+ providers. A CUSTOM/custom_provider option supports any OpenAI-compatible endpoint, and it can run fully local with no OpenAI key via Ollama or vLLM. It is deployed via Docker/Docker Compose or manual installation on your own infrastructure. Verified via GitHub API (15,033 stars, Apache-2.0, not archived, pushed 2026-06-20, v0.0.29) and corroborated by README, the official site, and codebase analysis of the LLM config/API-key management system.

How your API key is handled

You self-host the app, so your API key lives in your own deployment. 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

Deploy it (Docker/compose), add your provider API key in the admin or environment config, then select models.