What BYOK Actually Covers in Poko Motion (And the One Thing It Doesn't)

Bring Your Own Key is supposed to be simple: connect your own Anthropic or OpenAI key, stop touching Poko credits, done. Most of the time, that is exactly what happens. Then a project finishes, the usage dashboard shows a small charge anyway, and the natural reaction is to assume BYOK isn't working.

It is working. It just does not cover everything in a video, and knowing the one exception up front saves a confused support ticket later. For the full mechanics of turning it on plan by plan, see how BYOK works in Poko Motion.

What BYOK Actually Routes Through Your Own Key

When BYOK is switched on in Model Settings, two things move off Poko's billing and onto your provider account.

Agent and model usage. Every turn the video-building agent takes, reading your source material, planning the scene structure, writing narration copy, refining a cut after you ask for a change, runs on your connected key instead of Poko's proxy. This works with Anthropic and OpenAI keys, and experimentally with Gemini and xAI keys depending on which agent engine you have selected.

Voice narration. If you connect a Cartesia or ElevenLabs key separately in Voice Settings, narration generation also routes through your own account instead of Poko's included voice minutes.

Once both are connected, a project can run almost entirely outside Poko's credit system. That is the whole point of BYOK: predictable costs on your own provider account, full control over which model handles your data, and no proxy sitting between your source material and the model reading it.

The One Thing BYOK Doesn't Cover

Background music and sound effects are generated through Poko's own audio pipeline, not through a model you can bring a key for. There is currently no BYOK path for music or SFX generation, so every project that uses either one still draws from your Poko AI dollar balance, even if every other part of that same project is running fully on BYOK.

This is not a bug and not a partial rollout of BYOK. It is a straightforward limitation: Poko does not yet support connecting an external key for the audio generation providers behind music and sound effects, so that piece of the pipeline has nowhere else to route.

In practice this shows up as a small line item. Turn on background music and a couple of sound effect cues in Studio settings, and even a fully BYOK project will show a small music and SFX charge on the usage dashboard next to an otherwise near-zero LLM cost. That is expected, not a leak.

Why This Matters Before You Build, Not After

If a team connects BYOK specifically to get a project's cost down to nearly nothing, silent background music is the detail most likely to break that expectation. Two ways to plan around it:

Turn off music and SFX for cost-sensitive projects. Both are toggles in Studio generation defaults. If the goal is a project that runs entirely on your own provider account, turning both off before generation keeps the project fully off Poko's credit balance.

Budget a small, predictable amount for audio separately. Music and SFX costs are modest and show up as their own line items on the usage dashboard, broken out from LLM cost, so they are easy to track even across a fully BYOK workflow. Most teams that want narration and a music bed on every video simply treat this as a small fixed cost per project rather than trying to route it away entirely.

Where This Fits in the Bigger BYOK Picture

BYOK availability also depends on which plan you're on. It is available from Plus and up on lifetime plans, and from the entry tier upward on subscriptions, with agent gateway routing to tools like OpenRouter unlocking on Pro and above across both. None of that changes the audio exception. Regardless of plan tier or how BYOK is configured, music and SFX generation always bills from Poko credits, because there is no external key to route that cost to yet.

The short version: connect your key, and the agent's reasoning and your narration voice both move off Poko's balance immediately. Background music and sound effects stay on Poko credits no matter what, because that part of the pipeline does not have a BYOK option yet. Knowing that distinction before you build a cost-sensitive batch of videos means one less surprise on the usage dashboard, and one less reason to think BYOK isn't doing what it says.