There is a question every careful firm asks eventually, usually after the demo is over and the room has gone quiet: whose key is it?

It sounds like a billing detail. It is not. It is a question about the path — about how many parties sit between the solicitor's desk and the model that answers, and who each of them is.

Two ways to hold the key

On a managed key, the vendor holds the AI-provider credential and mediates every call. It is convenient, and for many firms it is fine. But it means the vendor sits in the path by design. Your usage runs through their account, on their terms, at whatever they choose to charge for the privilege of passing it along.

Bring-your-own-key, on the Enterprise tier, does the opposite. You put your own AI-provider credentials in play. Your calls are billed directly to you, by your provider, at your provider's published rates. We do not meter it. We do not mark it up. There is no line item where we sit between you and your usage and take a clip.

The commercial version of that is simple: you pay for the model exactly what the model costs, and you pay us for the product. Those are two separate things, and BYOK keeps them separate.

Why shortness is the point

The architectural version matters more.

The whole product is browser-resident. Matter data lives on your machine, in your browser's own storage — there is no vendor database of your files to breach or subpoena. Before anything reaches an AI model, a privilege gate runs in your browser and tells you exactly what would leave, so you decide before the send, not after. A human is on every consequential step; nothing goes out in the background.

BYOK is the last link in that same chain. With your own key, the call goes from your browser to your AI provider on your credentials. The shortest possible line between your desk and the model. Every party you remove from that path is one fewer place your matter can be logged, retained, or read by someone who is not you.

For a firm handling privileged and professionally-confidential material in England and Wales, that shortness is not a nice-to-have. It is the argument. "We take security seriously" is not a lawful basis for putting privileged communications through an intermediary you don't control. Removing the intermediary is a better answer than reassuring you about it.

What you hold, and what stays yours

The key is yours. You provision it, you can rotate it, you can revoke it, and the moment you do, the line is cut — no appeal to us, no ticket, no waiting. The usage record sits in your provider's account, under your name, which means the audit trail of what the model was asked and when belongs to you too.

We think that is the right default for the firms who care most about the path. Not because BYOK is fashionable, but because we built this product for solicitors who have to be able to say, precisely and on the record, where a privileged matter went and who touched it. The honest answer, on your own key, is: it went to your provider, on your credentials, and stopped there.

That is not a generic AI tool with a legal skin. It is an architecture designed by people who have had to answer that question for real.

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