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

Every companion runs on a language model. By default that model comes from a weside preset tied to the region and quality tier you chose, billed through your plan and credit. 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 model calls through it. The provider bills you directly, weside takes no cut, and BYOK needs no particular plan.

BYOK accepts four provider families: Anthropic, OpenAI, Mistral, and Google. The in-app provider picker is the live list — it always reflects exactly what is accepted.

Which models each family offers, and which one is strongest, is operational data: the registry is updated without a release, so this page names no model and no version. The picker and the Data locations list on the residency screen are the current answer.

Why it matters to you

BYOK puts you in control of the model and the bill. If you already have an account with one of these providers, you keep your existing rate limits and pricing instead of spending weside credit on model calls. It is also a residency decision: 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

Open DATA RESIDENCY from the pill on the Home surface.
Choose Your key.
Pick a provider family: Anthropic, OpenAI, Mistral, or Google.
Paste your API key. weside stores it encrypted, scoped to your account alone, and checks that it works before saving it.
Optionally pick which model to use, and a cheaper utility model for background work such as titles and summaries. Otherwise weside picks the canonical chat model for that provider.

The key is also handed 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

Your own key turns EU only off. Activating BYOK clears the EU-only switch in the same step, because weside cannot promise for a route it does not choose. The app says so where you make the change.
You cannot point a key at any endpoint you like. A custom endpoint exists as its own plan-gated custom connection — an OpenAI- or Anthropic-compatible URL with its own model name, context limit and declared capabilities, validated against internal addresses. No plan you can buy today includes it.
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 it; weside shows a banner asking you to fix it.
A malformed key is caught on entry rather than failing silently in the middle of a conversation.