Bring Your Own AI, Bring Your Own Budget

Most apps with "AI features" work the same way: you pay a monthly subscription, some unknown slice of it covers API costs, and you have no idea what any single feature actually costs to run — or which model is quietly doing the work behind the curtain. You're trusting a markup you can't see, on infrastructure you can't inspect.

IA Voice Notes does this differently, on purpose.

You pick the model. Literally.

In Settings, you choose your AI provider — Anthropic or OpenAI — and enter your own API key, stored in the iOS Keychain, not on our servers. There's no proprietary model running behind an opaque subscription. You're using the same providers, the same pricing, that you'd use for anything else. If you already have an Anthropic or OpenAI account for other work, you're not paying twice for two separate AI subscriptions — you're just pointing one more tool at the account you already have.

You see exactly what each note cost

Every time a note gets processed — summary, action items, Q&A, whatever the mode calls for — the app tracks the actual token usage and shows you the cost in US dollars, attached to that specific note. Not an estimate, not a monthly bill you have to guess your way through — the real number, per note, based on the real rate for the model you chose.

That's not a small thing. It means:

• You can tell if a feature is worth it. If live action-item detection on a two-hour meeting costs a few cents, that's an easy call. You don't have to wonder.
• Heavy users aren't subsidizing light users, and light users aren't paying a flat fee for capacity they don't touch. You pay for what you actually run, at the provider's real rate.
• Nothing is hidden. The cost isn't folded into a subscription tier designed to be hard to unit-economics your way through. It's a number, on the note, right after it processed.

Why this is worth caring about

Set aside the app for a second. This is really a question about how you want to relate to AI tools in general: do you want a subscription that obscures what's happening underneath, or do you want to see the meter running? For anyone who's ever wondered "wait, how much of my subscription is actually AI cost versus margin" — this is the alternative. Your key, your provider, your cost, visible on every note.

The takeaway

AI features shouldn't come with a black box where the pricing used to be. IA Voice Notes lets you bring your own provider and your own key, and shows you the exact dollar cost of every single thing the AI does — so you're never paying for a mystery, just for the work.