Why AnchoredTime lets you bring your own AI keys, and what we charge when you do not.
AI features cost real money to run. Most apps hide that fact. We decided not to.
This post is about two things: how AnchoredTime handles AI billing, and why we made the choices we made. It is not a sales pitch. It is a transparency document, the kind we would want to read before handing money to a software company.
The honest version of the problem
Large language models are not cheap to run. Every time AnchoredTime calls Claude or GPT to generate your Minimum Faithful Dose, process a journal entry, or produce a weekly summary, that call has a cost measured in fractions of a cent. Across thousands of users, fractions of a cent become significant.
Software companies handle this in a few standard ways.
The first way is to hide it in the pricing. Roll the AI cost into a flat subscription at a markup, do not disclose the margin, and hope users never notice. This works fine until the company needs to cut costs and quietly degrades the AI quality while the price stays the same.
The second way is to impose opaque usage caps. "AI features included" in the small print means 10 AI calls per month, and you find out when the feature stops working.
The third way is to use a cheap, low-quality model to compress costs and call it AI without telling you which model.
We did not want to do any of those things. Not because we are especially virtuous. Because we are Christians building a tool for Christians, and hidden margins on a tool meant to support honest living seemed like an odd place to start.
What BYOK is
BYOK stands for bring your own keys.
If you have an OpenAI or Anthropic developer account, you can enter your API key inside AnchoredTime. When you do, AI calls run directly against your account at exactly the rate those providers charge. No markup. No margin. You pay what the call costs.
That is it. No complicated setup, no monthly estimate, no surprise bill. You see what you use in your provider dashboard, the same way you would with any API consumer.
How we protect the key
Entering your API key into a third-party app requires trust, and trust requires transparency about what happens to the key.
Here is what we do:
Your key is encrypted immediately on the client side before it ever leaves your device. We use AES-256-GCM encryption. The master decryption key lives outside the database in a separately managed secrets layer. Your key is never stored in plaintext anywhere in our system.
After you save your key, we do not display it again. Not masked, not truncated, not "edit and see it." It is gone from the UI after the first save. If you need to rotate it, you enter a new one.
Your key is never logged. API request logs do not record the key value, not in debug logs, not in error traces, nowhere.
Every AI call made with your key is recorded in a per-user usage ledger inside AnchoredTime. You can see what was called and when. If something looks wrong, you have a record to investigate.
There is no silent fallback. If your key is invalid or hits a rate limit, the AI feature surfaces an error. We do not silently fall back to the platform budget without telling you. Your account is your account.
We are a small company. We do not have a security team of fifty people. We will make mistakes over time and we will disclose them. What we can promise is that the architecture above is real and in production, not aspirational.
What we charge when you do not bring your own key
Our tier structure is straightforward:
Seedling: free, forever. Daily Anchors, Grounded Response, Prayer, Journal, and Anchored Reset. No AI. No time limit. No "free trial" language. This is a complete daily rhythm tool for someone who does not want AI in their Christian formation practice, and that is a legitimate choice.
Anchored: $10 per month (or $100 per year). The strong everyday plan. Minimum Faithful Dose and Smart Recall, plus Voice transcription (log journal entries by talking), Drift Detection (gentle nudges when a pillar goes quiet), and Weekly Summaries. The AI budget built into this tier covers normal daily use.
Covenant: $20 per month (or $200 per year). Adds Quarterly Reviews, unlimited everything, voice archive export, early access, and Ecosystem identity (your AnchoredTime profile is your identity across the Anchorful product family). Designed for people leading others or building an intentional household rule of life.
Cornerstone: $600 once, lifetime access. Everything in Covenant, forever, in a single payment. No renewals. No future price increases apply to you. Limited founding seats. If you plan to use AnchoredTime long-term and want to stop thinking about the subscription, this is the option. It is also a way to support the mission directly.
If you use BYOK on the free Seedling tier, you can access AI features by paying exactly what the provider charges, nothing more. If you are on a paid tier and use BYOK, your subscription cost covers the non-AI features and your provider handles the AI cost directly.
Why we structured it this way
A few reasons, in order of how much they shaped the decision.
We wanted the core to be genuinely free. Anchored Reset, daily prayer and journaling, Scripture anchors: these are the practices the Church has used for two thousand years. Gating them behind a paywall felt wrong. The AI features cost money to run, so those live in paid tiers. The formation foundation does not.
We did not want to be in the business of guessing your usage. AI usage varies. A quiet week of short journal entries costs almost nothing. A week of deep journaling with long context windows costs more. If we had a flat AI budget and you used more than we priced for, we would either absorb the loss (not sustainable) or quietly cap you (dishonest). BYOK puts that variable in your hands.
We wanted pricing that a Christian could explain without wincing. "We charge what it costs to run, plus a sustainable margin to pay the people who build and maintain this." That is the honest summary. We have not invented a margin we are trying to obscure.
A note on trust
Software pricing is one of the places where companies most reliably behave badly. Hidden fees. Misleading free tiers. Features that work during the trial and quietly stop working after month one.
We are building a tool that will sit inside some of the most honest, private moments of a person's day: morning prayer, late-night journaling, the breath before a hard conversation. The pricing structure should be consistent with that trust, not corrosive of it.
"Whoever can be trusted with very little can also be trusted with much" (Luke 16:10). We are trying to be trustworthy with the small things. Billing is a small thing. Let us get it right.
How to see our current pricing
The full pricing page is at anchoredtime.com/pricing. It lists each tier, what is included, and what the AI features actually do. No asterisks, no fine print hidden in a FAQ.
If you have questions about BYOK setup, there is a short guide in the app under Settings. It walks you through where to create your key, what permissions to set, and how to enter it.
Start free on Seedling, or go straight to a paid tier if you want the AI features. No card required for the free tier.