Bring Your Own Key
Bring Your Own Key (BYOK) lets your district run Melaa on your own Anthropic account. You get the whole platform at a lower per-student rate, and your AI compute is billed to you directly by Anthropic at their rates, with no message pool and no throttle from Melaa.
How the billing works
- Same $500/yr base as fully managed, no setup fee. Your per-student rate is lower: $6.00 on your first 1,000 ML students, $5.00 for 1,001-5,000, and $4.00 beyond that (each rate applies only to that band).
- You pay Anthropic directly for compute. That variable cost, the part Melaa normally carries on the managed plan, passes straight through to you at Anthropic's rates.
- No pool, no throttle. Because you own the compute, there is no credit pool and no ceiling on your everyday AI use.
What it costs (estimated)
The table below compares the fully managed plan with BYOK. The platform-fee column is exact. The compute column is an estimate, anchored to typical adoption; your actual Anthropic bill is what you pay, and it is often much lower with education credits or a lighter model.
| ML students | Managed platform | BYOK platform | Your compute (est.) | BYOK all-in (est.) |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1,000 | $10,000/yr | $6,500/yr | ~$1,850/yr | ~$8,350/yr |
| 5,000 | $50,000/yr | $26,500/yr | ~$9,250/yr | ~$35,750/yr |
| 10,000 | $100,000/yr | $46,500/yr | ~$18,500/yr | ~$65,000/yr |
Estimates only, not a guarantee. The compute figure assumes typical usage and no discounts; it drops toward zero with education credits or a cheaper model tier. Even so, we estimate a district on BYOK pays less all-in than on the fully managed plan, and the platform fee alone is roughly a third lower.
What changes for your data
On the managed plan, model calls run through IncluSend's Anthropic account under our Zero Data Retention agreement. On BYOK, those calls run through your district's own Anthropic account, under that account's terms, so your provider becomes your own subprocessor and you control retention. Melaa still redacts student names before sending context to the model, exactly as on the managed plan. See our Privacy and Data Sharing pages.
Get set up
Setup takes a few minutes: create an Anthropic account, generate an API key, and paste it into Melaa. Our step-by-step setup guide walks through creating the account, making the key, and switching Melaa to run on it. You can also switch back to fully managed anytime, self-serve, from Settings.