A: Yes, BYOK is included on Tier 2 and above, so the highest plan definitely has it. You connect your own Anthropic (Claude) API key, and from that point your AI replies and tool calls cost 0 platform credits — you pay Anthropic's metered rates directly instead. Our prompt-caching optimizations apply to your own key too, so you get the same cost efficiency we've built for ourselves. And if your key ever fails (quota, billing), the bot doesn't go down it falls back to credits automatically and switches back to your key once it works again.

On DeepSeek and other cheap models: honest answer no, and it's a deliberate choice, not a roadmap gap. We tested OpenAI, Gemini, OpenRouter and open-source models at real production volume. For a hobby project a 9/10 success rate is fine; for live customer conversations, a 10% failure rate means broken bookings, hallucinated tool calls, and lost sales. The cheaper models' lower token price gets eaten by retries and worse conversions the cost per successful conversation ends up higher. We'd rather give you one provider that reliably closes deals than five that each break differently.

On the credit complaints: two things changed that. First, BYOK takes AI usage off credits entirely (the main thing people complained about). Second, we now have a Max tier our own in-house model at 0.25 credits per AI action (vs. 1 credit on Pro), which is the cheapest way to run on credits without bringing a key.

So on the top tier you're covered both ways: run on your own Anthropic key at cost, or on Max at a quarter-credit per action. Full details here: https://docs.dmchamp.com/ai-automation/ai-model-and-byok

Hope that helps with the decision!