What does BYOK mean and why does the app work this way?

BYOK is "bring your own key". You get an API key from an AI provider, paste it into Settings → AI, and the app calls that provider directly from your browser. Nothing routes through a TradePerformance server, and nothing is marked up.

The alternative — us buying tokens wholesale and reselling them inside a subscription — is how most apps do it, and it has three problems this one avoids.

You would pay a markup, forever. Someone has to cover the tokens plus a margin plus the variance of heavy users. That cost lands in the subscription whether you use AI or not.

Your trades would pass through our servers to get to the model. With BYOK the request goes from your browser to the provider and back. We are not in the path, so there is nothing for us to log, retain or leak.

You would get whichever model we picked. Instead you choose the provider and the model, and you can change either in ten seconds when something better ships.

What you give up is a little setup. You need an account with a provider and a key pasted in, per browser. That is the whole of it — see how to add and test a key.

And the app is fully usable without one. Every number, chart, statistic and report in TradePerformance is computed locally from your own trades. AI adds interpretation on top. See what happens with no key.