Why would I want more than one provider configured?

Because the app uses them together. With a free key and a paid key both saved, cheap work runs free, quality work runs paid, and a provider outage falls through to the other one instead of failing.

Three separate mechanisms reward having two keys.

Economy routing splits the work by kind. Mundane tasks — sentiment tagging, weekly reports, debrief drafts — go to the free provider. Quality tasks — chart reads, health checks, rule generation — always use your best available provider. You pay for the calls where the quality matters and nothing for the rest.

The Coach runs two-phase. On a deep question, the free tier does the data-gathering — the tool calls that fetch your trades and setups, which is the token-hungry part — and the paid tier writes the final answer from what came back. Much cheaper than running the whole loop on a premium model, with the quality where you can see it.

Failures fall through. If a provider returns a rate limit, an exhausted quota, or a bad-key error, the app tries the next saved provider rather than surfacing an error. There is also a circuit breaker per provider: after several consecutive outages it stops waiting out the timeout on that provider and goes straight to the next, retrying it after a short cooldown.

Voice is a fourth reason. Transcription uses Groq's Whisper when a Groq key is present. With only an OpenAI key and economy mode on, the app skips paid Whisper and falls back to the browser's own speech recognition — free, and noticeably worse on ticker symbols and numbers.