7.1 How to Configure BYOK (Bring Your Own Key) Multi-Provider AI Routing

How to connect customer-owned enterprise API keys for OpenAI, Anthropic, Gemini, Grok, and DeepSeek with custom spending limits.

Your Contracts, Your Keys, Your Bill

A lot of enterprises negotiate their own data-processing and zero-retention terms directly with OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, and other model providers – terms that only apply to traffic sent under their own account. Routing AI calls through a vendor-shared key defeats that: the traffic runs under whoever’s agreement is attached to that shared key, not yours, which is exactly the objection regulated industries raise first. BYOK moves every AI-backed operation in CertiQA – CertiHeal’s tier-5 visual matcher, CertiMind Copilot generation, LLM-as-a-Judge grading, and fuzzer response synthesis – onto API keys you hold directly, so the provider relationship, the spend, and the data-handling terms are all yours, not CertiQA’s.

The Five Task Categories Routing Decides Between

Model Routing Policy assigns a model per QA task category rather than one model for everything – the categories map to genuinely different accuracy, latency, and cost tradeoffs:

QA Task Category	What It Needs	What to Choose
Self-Healing & Fast Locators	Sub-second latency – it runs mid-execution, blocking the step	A fast, low-latency model
Test Case Authoring & Copilot	High structural DOM accuracy over raw speed	A strong general-purpose model
Autonomous Agent & LLM Judge	Deep reasoning against a rubric, not a quick lookup	A strong reasoning model
Playwright & TypeScript Export	Clean, idiomatic code synthesis	A strong code-capable model
Network Mocking & Synthesis	Fast JSON schema generation, low reasoning need	A fast, inexpensive model

Connecting Your Providers

• 1. Go to “Settings” in the left sidebar, then “BYOK & Model Routing”.
• 2. Enter your own API keys for OpenAI, Anthropic, Google Gemini, xAI Grok, or DeepSeek – add as many providers as you plan to route between.
• 3. Click “Save Credentials” – CertiQA validates and stores the credentials for model routing.
• 4. Set a Model Routing Policy mapping each task category above to a specific model from your connected providers.

Two Things That Bite People Later

• Key scope: a key with only chat-completion permissions fails the moment something routes through an embeddings-backed matcher – grant both completions and embeddings up front rather than debugging a scoped-down key later.
• Single points of failure: a run that depends entirely on one provider halts the moment that provider rate-limits or has an outage. Configure at least one fallback provider per category (e.g. OpenAI primary, Anthropic fallback) so a provider-side blip degrades a run instead of stopping it outright.