# Bring your own OpenAI key

AI answers run on OpenAI. To keep pricing simple, Clayo is free and you bring your own OpenAI key: answers bill to your key, at cost, with no markup.

## Start free, no key needed

Every project owner starts with 1,000 AI answers included, so you can ship your docs site and widget without touching an OpenAI account first. The allowance is per owner, covers all of that owner's projects, and never resets or expires. It is a zero-setup trial, not a monthly plan.

The Home page shows how many included answers remain. When they run out, AI answers pause until a key is added. Search is unaffected: keyword and semantic search on your docs site and widget keep working without a key.

## Add your key

To add a key, open **Account** in the dashboard, then the **Keys** tab, and find the OpenAI key row. Paste a key from your OpenAI dashboard (it starts with `sk-`).

Clayo validates the key against OpenAI when you save it, so typos are caught immediately.

![The Keys page with the OpenAI key row and API keys section](https://d1fz24v557o32j.cloudfront.net/project-images/0319adcc-8d8c-4b62-8847-5f6ca52a92ff/3a8ca937-bda3-41cf-afd7-3318b08120bf.png)

A project always bills to its owner's key. Teammates never need their own keys; if a key is missing, admins and members see a note asking the owner to add one.

## Your key is write-only

Treat API keys like passwords; Clayo does:

- The key is encrypted with a hardware-backed key management service before it is stored.
- It is never shown again after saving, anywhere: not in the dashboard, not in any API response. Only the last four characters are kept, for display.
- It is never logged.

To rotate a key, paste a new one over the old. To stop using AI answers, remove it; removing a key does not touch any remaining free allowance.

## What uses your key

- Visitor questions, in the docs site Ask AI panel and the widget's Ask tab
- Indexing your articles for semantic search when you publish

Costs stay small in practice: answers use an efficient OpenAI model, and Clayo skips the model call entirely when your docs have nothing relevant to say. You can check usage anytime from your coding tool:

```
Pull my docs insights. How many AI answers were served, and what was the token spend?
```

## Related

- [How AI answers work](/articles/how-ai-answers-work)
- [Insights: metrics and conversations](/articles/insights)