President365Q: Can LTD Buyers Trust This Deal After BYOK Removal?
Pickaxe LTD has been sold out for months, and BYOK (Bring Your Own API Key) was a core feature across all tiers. Removing BYOK after the LTD sold out materially changes the deal’s economics and forces ongoing costs that were never part of the original purchase.
Two direct questions:
1. How does Pickaxe justify removing a foundational cost-control feature AFTER LTD buyers committed and can no longer refund or decide based on full disclosure?
2. Will AppSumo enforce LTD protections by requiring either restoration of BYOK or true wholesale pass-through pricing identical to what BYOK provided?
This isn’t a minor update—it's a post-sale change that affects every LTD buyer. A clear, public answer from Pickaxe and AppSumo is needed.
Nathaniel_Pickaxe
Dec 2, 2025A: 1. We removed BYOK almost a year after our final LTD sale, as part of critical product updates. There's a long list of reasons we'd like to allow token usage to flow through us (easier for users, fewer API related bugs and errors), but the most important aspect is that we're charging at cost for model usage, so there shouldn't be any difference to you as a user. Additionally, if you were using the product and had your API keys added, you can continue to use the until mid next year! Our commitment to LTD buyers has always been to match what is available on the Gold plan. In this case, even our PRO plan has to follow the same rules. The product is much better in many ways than the one folks bought in 2024.
2. I can pretty much guarantee you AppSumo will not do anything about our choice to make this change, as it falls well within our agreement with them, and fundamentally doesn't change your experience at all. In fact, we've given LTD folks MORE usage than we did before in the new system.
I hope that helps!
The fact that BYOK was removed “almost a year after” your final LTD sale is exactly the problem. It was part of the original value proposition when we bought, and many of us only purchased because BYOK was clearly advertised. Time passing does not turn a core feature into something optional you can quietly revoke.
Please correct me 🙏,
⛏Pickaxe now uses:
1 credit = $0.01 of usage
(One cent per credit.)👈
Pickaxe calculates usage cost internally and deducts from your credits.
What’s missing?
No token pricing table
No per-model pricing
No per-action pricing
Example 1 — GPT-4o Mini Chat (1,000 input tokens + 1,000 output tokens)
OpenAI cost:
1,000 input tokens = $0.00015👇
Total: $0.00075 per query
This is dead wrong, as I explain here in great detail: https://community.pickaxe.co/t/concern-about-new-credit-system-and-missing-add-custom-api-key-byok-option/7442/14?u=nathaniel