Provider Setup & BYOK

Caide has exactly seven model providers. Everything else was removed and fails closed with a replacement message. User-key providers are free forever — Caide takes no token markup and imposes no usage quota on BYOK. Caide Agent is the only optional paid surface.

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The Seven Providers

Provider	How you authenticate	What it gives you
OpenRouter	OpenRouter API key	One key for hundreds of models across upstream labs
OpenCode Console	OpenCode Console API key	Paid Console catalog, including the OpenCode Go host
Caide Agent	Caide API key (dashboard)	Optional $2/month after a 7-day / 500-credit trial; powered by OpenCode Console
ChatGPT / Codex	Your official ChatGPT/Codex login	Codex models through your existing account; no API key
Claude Code	Your official Claude Code login / CLI	Claude Code through your existing account; no Anthropic API key
DeepSeek	DeepSeek API key	DeepSeek chat and reasoning models
Google	Google AI API key	Gemini models, including long-context and multimodal variants

There is no eighth provider, no custom-endpoint provider, and no local-runtime provider. Any other provider or endpoint is unsupported and fails closed.

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Free BYOK, Optional Caide Agent

• BYOK is free forever. You pay the provider directly; Caide does not meter, proxy, or mark up those calls.
• Caide Agent is optional. It is the only paid surface: $2/month after a 7-day trial with 500 credits. It runs on OpenCode Console, and the Console key stays on Caide's server — never in the desktop app.
• No other local feature is gated. Plan mode, Build mode, subagents, preview, publish, MCP, and the database tools work on BYOK.

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Credential Security

When you connect a BYOK provider:

1. The key is encrypted at rest with AES-256-GCM.
2. On the desktop, the encryption key is sealed in the OS keychain through Electron safeStorage (Keychain on macOS, Secret Service/libsecret on Linux, DPAPI on Windows). Headless servers fall back to a 0600 machine-local key.
3. The key is decrypted in memory only when preparing a request to that provider's endpoint.
4. Provider error bodies are redacted before they reach logs or the UI.

ChatGPT/Codex and Claude Code never ask for an API key. They use the official login/CLI session you already have.