Choosing a provider

Decide between Anthropic, OpenAI, Gemini, and OpenRouter — quick decision guide and rough costs.

What this is

Beach is BYOK — bring your own AI provider key. You pick which AI provider powers your agent's replies, and you pay that provider directly for the tokens your agent uses. Beach stores the key securely and your agent uses it; Beach doesn't mark up or resell tokens.

Four providers are live today: Anthropic, OpenAI, Google Gemini, and OpenRouter. You can switch between them at any time from Beach Settings, and the change takes effect on your agent's next message.

Quick decision guide

  • Anthropic (Claude) — Recommended. The default we point new users to. Claude tends to be the strongest fit for personal-agent style use: long, conversational threads, careful reasoning, and following nuanced instructions. If you're not sure where to start, start here.
  • OpenAI — A solid general-purpose option with the broadest model variety (GPT-4-class, smaller/faster models, etc.). Pick this if you already have an OpenAI account or want to swap between OpenAI's many model sizes.
  • Google Gemini — Strong on cheap and fast workloads, and very large context windows. Has a generous free tier for low-volume personal use, which makes it the cheapest place to start if you're cost-sensitive.
  • OpenRouter — One key gives access to many models from many providers. Useful for experimenting — flip between Claude, GPT-4, Llama, etc. without juggling multiple accounts. Trade-off: slightly less obvious cost picture, since each model has its own per-token rate.

Rough costs

You pay your AI provider directly. At typical personal-agent volume — a few thousand messages a month, mostly short — expect a few dollars a month. Heavier use (long chains of reasoning, lots of skill-driven tool calls, large attachments) scales up from there.

We don't quote exact $/token here because those numbers change. Check the pricing page on whichever provider you pick before you commit to a plan; all four publish current rates on their own sites.

Switching is easy

Provider choice isn't a lock-in. If your first pick isn't working out — too expensive, slow, or just not the answers you want — you can paste in a different provider's key from Beach Settings and your agent uses the new one immediately. No restart, no downtime. See Switching providers & rotating keys.

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