BYOK seems nice when targeting developers and/or dealing with potential abusive content and you want to put the risk back to the user.
In most other cases, including yours, I wouldn't do BYOK. If you do, not only does it add complexity to your codebase and lock you into using OpenAI going forward, it also makes it harder to price your product because customers will "feel" like most of the value is coming from OpenAI anyway.
In terms of pricing, it really depends on the value you're providing and the alternatives customers are replacing with your product.
At first glance, number of blog articles seems the closest linked to the value you provide. Sites with more articles, will likely get more value, etc.
Pageviews are hard to measure.
Team members/clients might make sense as an additional pricing knob. For example, you can have fixed monthly plans with different team limits, in addition to a variable pricing for the number of articles.
I recommend looking at analogous services like newsletters, etc that also deal with variable pricing (subscribers) and fixed pricing (features)
I considered BYO OpenAI key for rmflags.com as well and decided against it for the reasons you mentioned. Ultimately if the customer has to sign up for and manage their own OpenAI credits it just adds friction to the entire signup process.
However for simpleotp.com I did force users to supply their own SMTP credentials. I can’t risk ruining my email sending reputation because one user decides to send emails from a bad domain for example
For pricing, I thought about this for a long time and I think I’d rather charge according to the value the customer gets out of the solution instead of considering AI cost in too much detail upfront. I’m not saying I wouldn’t look at the AI cost, but I like to start with “okay, customer would otherwise have to pay an engineer $200/hour to do this task, so I’ll charge close to that” - and if AI spend is > $200/h, work backwards and figure out how to reduce the cost from there, or if not possible maybe it’s a bad business idea.
BYOK seems nice when targeting developers and/or dealing with potential abusive content and you want to put the risk back to the user.
In most other cases, including yours, I wouldn't do BYOK. If you do, not only does it add complexity to your codebase and lock you into using OpenAI going forward, it also makes it harder to price your product because customers will "feel" like most of the value is coming from OpenAI anyway.
In terms of pricing, it really depends on the value you're providing and the alternatives customers are replacing with your product.
At first glance, number of blog articles seems the closest linked to the value you provide. Sites with more articles, will likely get more value, etc.
Pageviews are hard to measure.
Team members/clients might make sense as an additional pricing knob. For example, you can have fixed monthly plans with different team limits, in addition to a variable pricing for the number of articles.
I recommend looking at analogous services like newsletters, etc that also deal with variable pricing (subscribers) and fixed pricing (features)
I considered BYO OpenAI key for rmflags.com as well and decided against it for the reasons you mentioned. Ultimately if the customer has to sign up for and manage their own OpenAI credits it just adds friction to the entire signup process.
However for simpleotp.com I did force users to supply their own SMTP credentials. I can’t risk ruining my email sending reputation because one user decides to send emails from a bad domain for example
For pricing, I thought about this for a long time and I think I’d rather charge according to the value the customer gets out of the solution instead of considering AI cost in too much detail upfront. I’m not saying I wouldn’t look at the AI cost, but I like to start with “okay, customer would otherwise have to pay an engineer $200/hour to do this task, so I’ll charge close to that” - and if AI spend is > $200/h, work backwards and figure out how to reduce the cost from there, or if not possible maybe it’s a bad business idea.