Pay once, then run iton the AI key you already have
Plenty of product owners and analysts already hold an API key: the team has an OpenAI account, the company standardised on Claude, procurement approved Mistral. Khint Lifetime is built for exactly that situation. One payment, your key in the keychain, and your agent runs stop drawing on anyone's monthly quota.
Two ways to pay
for the same shortcut
A tool that rewrites a ticket in two seconds is worth paying for. Which invoice it lands on is a different question, and it is often the one that stalls the purchase. On a monthly Khint plan you never think about keys: runs draw on a credit wallet that resets on the first of the month. On Lifetime you pay once and plug in a provider key you may already be expensing, which suits anyone whose usage is spiky, whose employer will not add another recurring line item, or who simply wants the model relationship to be theirs. Same agents, same workflows, same Memory, different meter.
From a provider key to a working shortcut
Five steps, and only the first two are setup.
Buy once, and Billing turns into a key field
Khint Lifetime is a single payment instead of a subscription. Once it is active, the plan banner in Settings, Billing is replaced by a Your API key block: a provider picker, a key field and a Test button. There is no seat count to manage and no renewal date to diary.
Pick your provider and paste the key
Anthropic, OpenAI, Mistral, Google Gemini, Qwen or Z.AI. Press Test and Khint validates the key against that provider before you rely on it, so a typo surfaces there and not in the middle of a refinement session. The key is written to your operating system keychain, not to a settings file you might sync somewhere by accident.
Run your agents exactly as before
Nothing about the daily gesture changes. Select the rough text, press Cmd+Shift+K, pick an agent, and the result is pasted back where you were typing. The difference is invisible and financial: that run goes out on your key, and Khint stops counting it against a credit wallet. Your provider bills the tokens, at whatever rate you already negotiated with them.
The idea bar runs on your key too
Type what you want in plain language in the palette, “summarise these notes and file the two decisions as issues”, and Khint plans the steps for you. The writing steps of that plan run on your key like any other agent run. See the idea bar for what the planner can and cannot assemble.
Capture joins in, if your key is an Anthropic one
Capturereads a region of your screen into text, and it will use your own key when that key is from Anthropic. With any of the other five providers, Capture keeps running on Khint's managed backend against the plan's monthly allowance. It is a deliberate limit rather than a silent fallback, so you can decide the provider with it in mind.
What runs on your key, and what does not
The split is fixed and worth reading before you buy.
The right-hand column is not an upsell: those are features whose prompts and models Khint controls end to end, so they keep running on the managed backend. Lifetime includes a 300 credit monthly allowance to cover them, which is the same allowance the Free plan gets. Everything you trigger by hand, all day, sits in the left-hand column.
Your key, and still the small payload
Bringing your own key changes who bills the tokens, not what gets sent. An agent still sees only the text you selected, plus the compacted summary of your active Memory session if you opted that agent in. Memory sessions themselves stay in a local database on your machine, and the input and output text of every run stays on-device even when you sign in for sync. If the model account being yours is what matters to you, read the privacy posture and how documents are handled next: those cover the other half of the question, which is what leaves your machine in the first place.
Common questions
Which AI providers can I bring a key for?
Six: Anthropic (Claude), OpenAI, Mistral, Google Gemini, Qwen and Z.AI. You pick one provider at a time in Settings, paste the key, and press Test before saving so you find out immediately whether the key works. Khint pins a sensible default model per provider today rather than exposing a model list, so there is nothing else to configure. Switching provider later is just picking another one and pasting a new key.
Does my API key leave my machine?
It is stored on your device, in the operating system keychain (Keychain on macOS, Credential Vault on Windows), never in a plain settings file. It is not stored on Khint's servers. On each run it does travel with the request: the desktop app attaches it, Khint's backend swaps it in for its own key and forwards the call to your provider over TLS, without logging or keeping it. That round trip is the honest trade-off to know about before you choose this over a purely local setup.
What still uses Khint credits when I bring my own key?
Your agent runs and the inline steps of an idea-bar request run on your key and are not metered by Khint at all: your provider bills those tokens. Capture also runs on your key if the key is an Anthropic one. A few things stay on Khint's managed backend by design: PowerPoint diagram generation, the Memory working state and recaps, long-document summaries, the Generate and Improve buttons in the agent editor, and voice dictation. The Lifetime plan carries a 300 credit monthly allowance that covers those.
Do I need a specific plan to use my own key?
Yes. Bring-your-own-key is what the Khint Lifetime plan is: one payment of 349 euros as a launch offer running to 30 September 2026, then your own provider key does the work. The monthly plans (Free, Lite, Pro, Max) work the other way round: no key to manage, and every run draws on a shared monthly credit wallet. Both give you the same agents, workflows, Capture and Memory.
Try it before you bring a key
Free with 300 credits a month, about 10 AI actions a day. No credit card. Move to Lifetime when you want your own key doing the work.