What bring-your-own-key actually costs: the real math
Every AI tool you use is paying for tokens somehow. The $20 subscription bundles hide the meter behind a flat fee and a rate limit; API accounts put the meter in front of you and bill per million tokens. Dracon is built on the second shape: you bring your own provider keys, our tools are the interface, and the token bill lands on accounts you own. This article is the arithmetic of that choice, using only prices from our provider catalog and our own pricing page.
What the subscription shape costs
Our catalog tracks 45 AI providers, and consumer tiers cluster tightly: ChatGPT Plus $20/month, Claude Pro $20/month, Google AI Pro $19.99/month, Mistral Pro $14.99/month, SuperGrok $30/month. You buy a monthly allowance of messages, not tokens. ChatGPT Plus lists roughly 20 messages per 5-hour window on base Codex models; higher tiers are multipliers of that window. Two bundles — Claude for writing plus ChatGPT for code, or Gemini for search plus Grok for images — puts you at $35 to $50 before API spend. Three bundles pushes $55 to $70, with a window limit on each.
What the BYOK shape costs — the $0.28 month
Take the cheapest frontier-class API price we track: DeepSeek V4 Flash at $0.14 per million input tokens and $0.28 per million output as of its 2026-07-31 beta. A heavy personal month — 30 long conversations a day — is roughly 1M input and 0.5M output tokens. That is 1.0M × $0.14 + 0.5M × $0.28 = $0.28. Add Dracon Omni at the $10 founding price and the month is $10.28. Ten times that — 10M in, 5M out with daily agent runs — is $2.80 in tokens, $12.80 with Omni. Route free tiers instead (Groq up to 14.4K requests/day no card, OpenRouter 50 free requests/day, Google AI Studio ~1,500/day) and tokens are $0; the month is $10 alone. Try it today on /chat with a per-session paste.
| Monthly usage | Provider route | Token cost | Total with Omni |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1M in / 0.5M out (heavy personal chat) | DeepSeek V4 Flash $0.14 / $0.28 | $0.28 | $10.28 |
| 10M in / 5M out (power user) | DeepSeek V4 Flash $0.14 / $0.28 | $2.80 | $12.80 |
| Light daily use | Free tiers: Groq, OpenRouter, Google AI Studio | $0.00 | $10.00 |
| For contrast: one bundle | One typical AI subscription | included | $20.00 |
| For contrast: two bundles | ChatGPT Plus + Claude Pro | included | $40.00 |
The catalog behind the numbers: 45 providers, 26 BYOK-ready
Prices live in web/packages/byok/src/data/byok-registry.json — 45 entries as rendered at /ai-hub/providers on 2026-08-16. Of those, 26 are supported BYOK: Alibaba DashScope, Anthropic, Cerebras, Chutes, DeepInfra, DeepSeek, Fireworks AI, GitHub Models, Google AI Studio, Grok, Groq, Hugging Face, Hyperbolic, Kimi, MiniMax, Mistral, NVIDIA NIM, Ollama, OpenAI API, OpenCode, OpenRouter, Perplexity, SambaNova, SiliconFlow, Venice, Z.AI GLM. Twenty-one carry a free-tier flag. The other 19 are listed as unsupported with a reason — endpoint unverified, CLI tool not an API, requires an account ID, or browser calls blocked by CSP — so the claim is auditable.
How to run the math for your workload
A page of dense text is ~500 tokens; a long chat turn with tool output is 1,000–3,000 tokens; a 10-page PDF is ~5,000 tokens. Pick the model per task, then multiply. The free-tier hub shows the input/output split.
- Estimate: daily conversations × avg tokens per turn × 30. At 3,000 input and 1,500 output per day you hit ~90K in and ~45K out per month — one tenth of the heavy-chat row.
- Route cheap lanes for drafting (DeepSeek V4 Flash, Groq-hosted Llama, SiliconFlow 100/day + $1 credit) and reserve a frontier lane (Anthropic, OpenAI, Google AI Studio) only when the reasoning gap matters.
- Apply the split: (input_M × input_price) + (output_M × output_price). Add $10 for Omni if you want hosted tools; leave it $0 if you only use /chat with free-tier keys per session.
Free-tier lanes that make the $10 month real
Several free tiers are not demos. Groq gives 30/min and 1K–14.4K/day by model, no card. Google AI Studio gives ~1,500/day. NVIDIA NIM sits near 40/min with no daily cap. OpenRouter gives 50/day free, 1,000/day after $10 credit — cheaper than a bundle as a fallback. We flag the usable ones in the free-tier comparison. Browser-direct BYOK matters: trying three lanes costs three pastes, not three lock-ins.
Why Dracon can charge $10 and be honest about it
The reason is cost structure, not generosity. On /chat your browser calls the provider directly; we never proxy, so we never pay for your tokens. Marginal cost per subscriber is ~$0 — static pages, object-storage streaming, and browser-direct AI mean one more user costs nothing measurable. The $10 founding tier (locked while subscribed; $15 standard later) buys everything on dracon.uk with zero markup on keys. The free surface is free: chat with free-tier keys costs nothing, and the vault at /dashboard/settings is optional.
The honest catches — and when the bundle wins
- You manage keys. Generating a key and pasting it into a tool is five minutes once; saving in the vault follows you, pasting per session keeps it off our servers.
- Cheap ≠ flagship. Routing 90% to a cheap lane and hard questions to a frontier model is the saving; using the priciest model for everything can pass $20.
- Rate limits move both ways. Bundles cap messages per window; free tiers cap requests per day. Our free-tier roundup tracks which limits hold up, because quotas tighten quietly.
- The $20 bundle wins if you want one bill, one app, zero setup. If you live in one chat app with memory and mobile, stay there. We are for people who prefer to own the meter.
- Founding $10 is a lock, not a forever price for newcomers. Keep the sub, keep $10; new buyers after the window pay $15 standard — still one tier for everything.
Where to check the live numbers next
Prices move in weeks, so treat directories as truth. Start with the provider directory for per-provider prices and browser-direct status, check the free-tier hub for usable limits, try a lane on /chat per session, and compare on our pricing page. If a number here no longer matches the directory, the directory is right.
A second scenario: the heavy user
The heavy-user math matters more than the light-user headline. Take a freelance developer who routes every ticket through our chat page with their own keys: roughly 5 million input and 2.5 million output tokens a month across planning, coding, and review. At DeepSeek V4 Flash ($0.14/$0.28) that is about $1.40. At GPT-5.6 Luna's new price ($0.20/$1.20) it is about $4.00. At Anthropic's Claude pricing (higher per million, captured in the same catalog at the provider directory) the same volume is roughly $15–$18. Add Dracon Omni at the $10 founding price and the heaviest of those three is still $28 — under the $40 you would pay for two subscription bundles without their window limits, and you keep the ability to swap models per task: frontier for reasoning, flash for bulk. The free-tier hub changes the math further — Groq's 14.4K requests/day or OpenRouter's 50 free-model requests/day can cover the bulk lane at zero token cost, with Omni as the only fixed line.
Who should stay on subscriptions
The $20 bundle is still the right buy if you want one bill, one app, and zero setup. If you live in one chat app, like its memory and mobile app, and you never want to see a token price, stay there. Subscriptions buy convenience and integration — memory, file search, canvas, voice — that a raw API key does not include until you build it. We are the shape for people who would rather own the meter and swap providers with one click, who already track usage per project, or who hit the bundle's 20-messages-per-5-hours window and feel the cap. Both shapes are valid; the honest comparison is not $0.28 versus $20 but $10.28 with control versus $20–$50 with limits. Our plans page tracks the recurring kind, because a $5 credit that expires in 40 days is not a business model — a free tier you can use every day is.