Providers & bring your own key
You can let weside provide the model, or bring your own key and pay the provider directly — no markup.
What it is
Section titled “What it is”Every companion runs on a language model. By default that model comes from a weside preset tied to your region and quality tier, billed through your plan and credits. The alternative is bring your own key (BYOK): you supply an API key from a provider you already pay, and weside routes your companion’s calls through it. The provider bills you directly; weside takes no cut.
BYOK currently supports four provider families: Anthropic, OpenAI, Mistral, and Google. The in-app provider picker is the live list — it always reflects exactly what’s accepted.
Notable models
Section titled “Notable models”Claude Fable 5 (Anthropic) is the current top-tier reasoning model available on weside — above Opus 4.8, with a 1 million token context window. It powers the deep quality tier on Soulmate plans, and is also accessible via BYOK with an Anthropic key.
AWS Bedrock is an alternative way to run Claude models in the EU: Claude Opus, Sonnet, and Haiku 4.5 on Bedrock’s eu-central-1 region, with the same 1M context and no EU surcharge. It appears as a provider option in the regional preset picker — you don’t need your own Bedrock account to use it through weside presets.
Why it matters to you
Section titled “Why it matters to you”BYOK puts you in control of the model and the bill. If you already have an Anthropic or OpenAI account, you keep your existing rate limits and pricing instead of buying weside credits. It’s also a residency choice: with your own key, your companion’s model calls go wherever your provider runs them, so the data path is yours to reason about.
How you use it
Section titled “How you use it”- Open Settings → Data residency and choose Bring your own key.
- Pick a provider family: Anthropic, OpenAI, Mistral, or Google.
- Paste your API key. weside stores it encrypted, scoped to your account alone, and runs a one-token probe to confirm it works.
- Optionally pick which model to use; otherwise weside selects the canonical chat model for that provider.
The key is also surfaced to your companion’s MCP tools, so the same provider choice applies when you reach your companion from Claude Code or Cursor.
Limits & edge cases
Section titled “Limits & edge cases”- weside controls each provider’s base URL — you can’t point a key at an arbitrary endpoint.
- Embedding, voice, and image-only models are filtered out; only chat-capable models appear.
- If you remove or rotate a key, your companion stops until you reconfigure; weside shows a banner prompting you to fix it.
- A malformed key is caught on entry rather than failing silently mid-conversation.