Bring your own key

Three things change, and each cuts both ways:

• Billing. Usage lands on your provider's bill instead of the vendor's — along with the provider's rate limits, outages and account management.
• Choice. You pick the model, and you also own the job of evaluating it when quality moves.
• Data path. Prompts go to a provider you have a contract with, under terms you agreed — which a security review can assess, and which you now have to maintain.

Some teams point the integration at a model running on their own hardware, which turns where does the data go into an architectural answer rather than a contractual one.

The trade is quality and speed against control, plus the work of running the model. For most teams a managed default is the simpler choice.

The feature should degrade honestly. With no key configured, an assistive feature ought to fall back to something deterministic and say that it did, rather than erroring or quietly producing something that looks generated.

And the credential should be revocable by you, in one place, without a support ticket. A key you cannot rotate yourself is not really yours.

SalesShift runs the assistant on infrastructure it operates and meters it in credits, so there is nothing to configure, and your data is never used as training data. Connecting your own key is available as an option for workspaces whose policy requires a specific provider.