Use My Own AI: bring your own key, run unlimited AI

Almost every AI hiring tool works the same way: it meters each action and bills you for it. A match costs something, an interview costs more, scoring adds up, and the invoice climbs in lockstep with how much hiring you do. For occasional hiring that is fine. But if you run a lot of roles, that per-action meter turns your most productive months into your most expensive ones, and you find yourself rationing the very automation you bought the tool for. So we built a different option: Use My Own AI.

The trouble with metered AI

Metering has two costs, and only one of them shows up on the invoice. The obvious one is money: at volume, per-action pricing gets expensive. The hidden one is behavioural: when every match and interview has a price tag, teams start second-guessing whether to run them. People screen fewer candidates “to save credits,” skip the AI interview for borderline applicants, and generally use the tool less than they should. That is the worst possible outcome: you have paid for a capability and then talked yourself out of using it.

For high-volume hirers especially, the math also just stops making sense. Once your monthly usage is large and predictable, paying a marked-up per-action rate is strictly worse than paying for that usage at cost. You're effectively paying a middleman margin on every single AI call.

How Use My Own AI works

The idea is simple: you bring the AI, we bring the product around it. Pick a provider, paste your API key once, and you're set. From then on, every AI feature in Spoon runs on your key:

• No Spoon credits are consumed by AI actions; there's nothing to top up and no balance to watch.
• You run as much matching, interviewing and scoring as you want; it's genuinely unlimited on the platform side.
• Usage bills to you directly from your provider, normally at their list rate, with no markup from us.
• It's a flat monthly platform fee, or annual with two months free.

The experience inside Spoon Hire is identical: the same interviews, the same skills-first shortlists, the same scoring. The only thing that changes is whose meter the underlying AI runs on, and the fact that you are no longer watching it.

Who it's for

This tier is built for teams that have outgrown metering: agencies and RPOs running many roles at once, high-volume employers, and anyone who already has an AI provider account they'd rather use directly. A simple test: estimate your monthly AI usage. If running it at your provider's cost plus a flat platform fee would come in under what you'd pay in metered credits, Use My Own AI is both cheaper and calmer: one predictable line item instead of a meter you have to manage.

If you hire occasionally, the opposite is true: a normal credit plan with pay-as-you-go actions will be simpler and cheaper. The two models exist precisely because different teams sit on different sides of that line.

Your key, your control

Bringing your own key also means bringing your own governance. You choose the provider you already trust, Anthropic, OpenAI, Google Gemini or Mistral, and keep your AI usage on your own account, under your own contracts and data terms. Your key is encrypted at rest, never shown back to you, and removable at any time. You stay in control of spend, of provider choice, and of where your usage lives.

The bottom line

Metered AI quietly punishes the teams who hire the most. Use My Own AI flips that: bring your key, pay one predictable fee, and run the platform's AI without counting actions. It is the option we would want if we were hiring at scale.

Learn about Use My Own AI → · Compare with credit plans →

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