Setting Up Your OpenRouter Key
Use your own OpenRouter API key to control AI costs and model selection.
BYOK (Bring Your Own Key) lets you route AI calls through your own API key so you control costs, billing, and model selection. Ticket0 doesn't ship with a default managed key — an OpenRouter key is required before AI features will work.
OpenRouter is the required entry point because it covers every model Ticket0 uses (Anthropic, OpenAI, Google) behind a single key and unified API. You can layer direct provider keys on top to save ~5% on routing markup (see Direct provider keys below), but the OpenRouter key stays required even then — Ticket0 automatically falls back to OpenRouter when a direct call fails (provider outage, rate limit, transient network issue), so it doubles as a reliability safety net.
Get an OpenRouter key
- Sign up at openrouter.ai
- Go to Keys → Create key
- Set a credit limit if you want a hard spending cap
- Copy the key (
sk-or-...)
Add the key to Ticket0
- In your workspace, go to AI Agent → API Keys
- Paste your key into the OpenRouter API key field
- Click Test — Ticket0 makes a live call to verify the key works
- Click Save
Direct provider keys (optional)
OpenRouter marks calls up ~5%. You can add direct keys for Anthropic, OpenAI, and/or Google on the same settings page to bypass that markup and pay the underlying provider directly.
When a direct key is configured for a model's provider, Ticket0 calls the provider directly first. If that call fails (outage, rate limit, transient network error), it automatically retries the request through OpenRouter — so you get the cost savings without giving up redundancy. This is why the OpenRouter key stays required even in a direct-key setup.
Add direct keys the same way: paste, Test, Save.
Model selection
Ticket0 picks the right model for each task internally (fast/cheap for classification, higher-quality for draft replies, an embedding model for the knowledge base, and so on). You don't configure this per task — your OpenRouter key just needs to have access to the underlying providers, which it does out of the box.
Spend cap
Set a monthly spend cap (USD) in the same AI settings page. Ticket0 pauses AI features when the cap is reached and sends you an email alert at 80% and 100%.