Every routed request through route.tools can be paid for in one of two ways, and the honest thing about running the router is that I have to tell you when the cheaper one is not mine. Bundled pricing means you use our provider accounts: one key, one bill, prices at provider list plus 20%. BYOK (bring your own keys) means you plug your existing provider accounts into the router: the provider bills you directly at whatever rate you have, and we charge a 5% platform fee for the routing, failover, and normalization layer. The full mechanics are at /docs/byok.
Two prices for the same requests means there is a crossover point, and finding yours is arithmetic, not philosophy. Let us do the arithmetic.
The base case: 20% vs 5%
Take web search on Serper, the price floor of our search catalog. List price works out to $1.00 per thousand queries; routed bundled price is $1.20, per the pricing docs.
At one million queries a month, bundled costs $1,200. BYOK costs the $1,000 you pay Serper directly, plus roughly $50 in platform fees, call it $1,050. BYOK saves about $150 a month, or 12.5% of the bundled bill. That ratio holds across categories, because both the margin and the fee scale with the same underlying prices: at list rates, BYOK cuts your effective markup from 20 points to about 5.
Whether $150 matters depends entirely on what it buys back. BYOK means you hold the provider relationship: the account, the payment method, the rate limits, the ToS acceptance, times every provider in your failover chain. For the search category alone that could be six vendor accounts. Bundled means none of that exists for you. At small volumes, the markup you save on BYOK does not cover the afternoon you spend setting it up. At $10,000 a month of tool spend, saving 12-13% is real money and the afternoon is obviously worth it.
Negotiated rates change the answer, a lot
The base case understates BYOK for exactly the customers most likely to use it. Our bundled prices are pegged to list. If your volume has earned you a negotiated rate, a committed-use discount, or startup credits with a provider, bundled pricing cannot see any of that, but BYOK inherits it automatically, because the provider is billing you on your own terms.
Say you have negotiated 30% off list with your primary search provider. Now the comparison is $1,200 bundled versus roughly $700 direct plus the platform fee. The savings stop being a rounding error and become the majority of the bill. This is the cleanest way I can state the rule: the better your direct pricing, the more BYOK wins, and past any meaningful discount it is not close. Provider credits are the extreme case; burning free credits through your own keys while keeping router failover is strictly better than paying our list-plus-20% for the same calls.
What the 5% is actually for
A fair question is why BYOK costs anything, since you are paying the providers yourself. The fee covers the part of the stack that is not the API call: failover across up to three providers per request, the circuit breaker that skips providers running above a 30% error rate over five minutes, normalized schemas per category, the routing.attempted chain and per-call pricing in every response, and saved routing preferences so provider changes are configuration rather than deploys. If that layer is not worth 5% to you, the honest conclusion is that you do not need a router at all, and you should call providers directly for free. I wrote the build-vs-buy version of that argument elsewhere; the short version is that DIY is genuinely viable and the question is only whose time maintains it.
Mixing the two
The decision is not global. The pattern I see most, and the one I would run myself, is BYOK on the one or two categories where you have volume or a negotiated rate, bundled everywhere else. Your search traffic runs through your discounted Serper account at 5%, while the long tail (the occasional parse call, the once-a-week video clip) rides bundled keys you never had to provision. You keep one integration and one routing layer, and each category sits on whichever pricing side is cheaper for your situation. The $2 of signup credits exist precisely so you can test the whole surface on bundled keys before deciding which categories deserve the BYOK treatment.
The worksheet
Three numbers decide it per category. Your monthly spend at list prices. Your discount off list, if any. And your honest cost of holding provider accounts, in hours. Below a few hundred dollars a month with no discounts, bundled wins on pure convenience. Above that, BYOK saves 12-13% at list and dramatically more with negotiated rates, and the setup cost amortizes quickly. Either way the router layer is the same; you are only choosing who holds the keys.
List and routed prices for every provider we support are side by side on the comparison pages: start with the search API comparison and run your own numbers.