Why We Removed API Keys: Simple Credit Pricing

When we first launched Flowfiy, we asked customers to bring their own API keys — connect an AI account, connect a data provider, manage the billing for each. It worked, but it put setup friction and a stack of separate bills between you and your first batch of leads.

So we removed the keys entirely. The AI and the data sources are now fully managed, and you pay one simple price. Here's exactly why — and what it means for you.

What bring-your-own-key actually cost you

On the old model you signed up for an AI provider, generated a key, added a payment method, then did the same for a data source. Every run touched two or three separate accounts you had to top up, monitor, and reconcile yourself.

For a few power users that was fine. For everyone else it meant juggling provider dashboards, surprise overages, and a setup checklist before they could even describe their first search. We decided that was the wrong thing to ask.

What credits mean in practice

Now there are no keys to connect. The AI runs on fully managed Google Gemini, the lead sources are built in, and email verification and enrichment are included. You describe the leads you want in plain English and Flowfiy finds real businesses on Google Maps, qualifies them by how much they need your service, and writes the outreach.

You pay in credits. One subscription is $50/month for 400 credits — roughly 600–800 leads, depending on the search. A credit is about two qualified leads, and you only pay for leads that qualify. An empty search costs nothing.

What Flowfiy charges for is the whole managed pipeline: condition-based targeting, the research and 0–100 scoring on every lead, the personalized cold emails and follow-ups, the Gmail send-after-review flow, and the infrastructure underneath. No keys, no per-tool setup, no separate bills.

The math at scale

Why we built it this way

There are two reasons, and both come down to what we think is right:

1. Alignment of incentives. You only spend credits on leads that actually qualify — an empty search costs nothing. That means we win when the search is good, not when it's big. There's no incentive for us to pad your results with junk, because junk doesn't get charged.

2. One price, zero ops. The hard, valuable part of Flowfiy isn't the raw AI — it's the condition-based targeting, the research and 0–100 scoring on every lead, the quality guardrails, the job queue with retries, and the Gmail send flow. We run and pay for the AI and data providers ourselves so you get one predictable bill instead of three dashboards and a stack of surprise overages.

The one tradeoff

With managed pricing you don't see the raw provider invoices, and you don't pick the underlying AI model — we do, and we tune it per task. In exchange you get a fixed monthly price, no key management, and no exposure to per-token billing swings.

For teams that want to micromanage every provider line item, a bring-your-own-key tool might feel more hands-on. But for revenue teams who just want qualified leads with a predictable cost, one managed plan is almost always the better deal.