BYOK: your key, your provider price
Most AI testing tools resell model usage as "credits" at a conversion rate you can't audit. TestAutomate doesn't. Plug in your own key and every token is billed by your provider, to you, at your price. We show you the dollars as they accrue.
- Keys supported today. Anthropic, Amazon Bedrock, Google Gemini, and Groq. OpenAI and xAI keys are on the roadmap. coming
- At-cost pass-through. Model spend is your provider's price — TestAutomate adds nothing on top of BYOK usage.
- Live meters. Every run and every sprint sweep shows its spend in dollars, updating as it goes, with the model named.
- Hard ceilings. Set a budget on a run or a sweep. This is a product promise: when spend reaches the ceiling, the work stops cleanly and reports what it graded so far. Nothing keeps spending in the background.
Cheap by engineering, not by discount
At-cost billing only matters if the cost itself is low. TestAutomate is built to spend as few tokens as possible per verdict.
Accessibility tree first
The agent reads your page's accessibility tree — structured text — instead of pushing a screenshot through a vision model at every step. Text tokens are a fraction of the price of image tokens. Screenshots are still captured where they belong: as evidence in your verdicts.
Model tiering
An inexpensive model drives the browser for routine steps. Stronger, pricier models are reserved for the moments that earn them — grading verdicts and re-driving failures on escalation. You pay for judgment, not for clicking.
Caching and learned skills
Login recipes, nav notes, and playbooks from your docs mean later runs skip the exploration earlier runs paid for. Prompt caching cuts the repeated context cost. The tenth run of a test is meaningfully cheaper than the first.
Credit-metered pricing vs. at-cost pricing
| Credit-metered AI SaaS | TestAutomate | |
|---|---|---|
| What a run costs | Some number of "credits" — the dollar conversion is opaque and set by the vendor | Provider price, passed through at cost, shown live in dollars |
| When models get cheaper | Vendor margin widens; credit prices rarely follow | Your cost drops the day your provider's price does |
| Visibility | A credit balance draining at an unstated rate | Per-run and per-sweep meters, model named, dollars stated |
| Overruns | A surprise top-up, or a hard credit wall mid-run | Hard budget ceilings you set — work stops cleanly at the line |
| Your tests | Locked in a proprietary format | Portable, human-readable YAML you can take anywhere |
Three ways to pay — pick per team
Bring your own key
Anthropic, Bedrock, Gemini, or Groq today. At-cost pass-through, live meters, hard ceilings. The default for teams that already have a provider relationship.
Managed credits
No key? Buy prepaid credits and start immediately. You pay the provider's price plus a stated fee — stated, as in printed next to the price, not buried in a conversion rate. Switch to BYOK any time.
Your Claude Code subscription
Developers can run TestAutomate locally on the Claude Code subscription they already pay for — zero marginal model cost per run. The whole stack self-hosts on Node and Postgres. See the developer workflow.
Set a ceiling. Watch the meter. Keep the difference.
Start with your own key or with credits — either way, you'll always know what a verdict cost.