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The hosted product does not offer customer-facing BYOK. In hosted mode, ECN uses managed provider keys and meters usage to your credit wallet. BYOK is a property of the self-host / Community edition, gated by ECN_DEPLOYMENT_MODE.

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Why

The hosted product’s value is convenience and a trustworthy, audited cost-plus credit system. Letting customers inject their own keys into the managed environment would undercut that model and complicate metering. So:
  • Hosted → managed credits only.
  • Self-host (Community edition) → you own the keys, you pay providers directly, $0 to ECN for AI usage.

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Self-hosting with your own keys

When you run ECN yourself, configure providers via environment variables — the same ones the managed product uses internally: 
ECN_DEPLOYMENT_MODE=self_host
OPENROUTER_API_KEY=sk-or-...
APIFY_API_TOKEN=apify_api_...
DATABASE_URL=postgres://.../ecn   # with pgvector
Usage still flows through the AI Gateway and is recorded as UsageEvents for your own observability — you just aren’t billed by ECN.
Roadmap: BYOK ships with the v3 Community/self-host edition (Linear TER-156, label byok-v3). Historical PRDs that describe BYOK as a hosted v2 feature are superseded by this direction.