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Comment by aliasxneo | Hacker News Reader

So is this yet another SaaS product that's going to attempt to charge me for token usage? Sorry to sound negative, but nowadays it's an instant turn off because it's like the current subscription crisis on steroids. BYOA should be a default.

To be more constructive: let's say I have 2 frontier subscriptions and I end up with 20% left on each at the end of the week. It feels awful knowing that I would _love_ to use that with Momentic but I can't because I have to pay for yet another set of proprietary non-transferable tokens. It's like dealing with airline rewards.

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Hey I'm Jeff (one of the co-founders). That's fair feedback. We wrestled a lot with whether to support BYOA or open source the harness. Ultimately there was no configuration with off the shelf models that we were happy with performance-wise. A lot of the eng work that went into this came tuning custom agents from large datasets to do the "grunt work" like element grounding and visual understanding. Plugging in vanilla GPT6.1 Sol for every task into our harness just doesn't yield a pareto optimal result that makes sense as a standalone product (you are better off asking codex to test).

That doesn't mean we won't eventually support byok, especially as OSS models catch up! We have our finger on the trigger there.

the harness is the lock-in with these subscriptions. if you could just take your tokens to any app, there would be no point to stay on that companies ecosystem. I definitely agree that tokens and subscriptions should be portable and fungible, but any service offering that would be much more expensive than just getting a claude or codex sub.

It would be really nice to be able to plug in the subs from the labs. The industry seems to be moving that way even if its still super limited. Ex https://loginwith.ai

That is great. But hard to implement for side projects or independent devs, its a partner program that they can only approve the businesses they deem acceptable.

What does BYOA mean?

I literally just made it up: Bring your own Agent. It was a poor attempt at making fun of the current SaaS landscape. Although I would be surprised to be the first one to have ever used that acronym.

Interesting, I assumed Bring Your Own API-key

Assuming agent/access tokens, in other words you're not going through a middleman for LLM access.

I assume bring your own agent

BYOK (bring your own key) is the term the parent meant to say.

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