pavel 1ar.ionov
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Sumr BYOK: What It Covers and What It Doesn't

Sumr supports Bring Your Own Key for web pages, plain text, and YouTube. PDF and social media video summarization requires a Sumr subscription. Here's why.

Sumr has supported Bring Your Own Key (BYOK) since day one. Plug in your own OpenAI API key, pay only for what you use, keep full control. That part hasn’t changed.

But not everything in Sumr can run through a user-provided key. Here’s the breakdown.

What BYOK covers

With your own API key, you can summarize:

  • Web pages (articles, blog posts, documentation)
  • Plain text (paste or share any text content)
  • YouTube videos (via publicly available transcripts)

These content types go straight from your device to the LLM. Your key, your tokens, your bill. Sumr acts as a thin client.

What requires a subscription

PDF summarization and social media video summarization are subscription-only features. This includes PDFs (shared as files or links), TikTok, Instagram Reels, X (Twitter) videos, and Facebook videos.

There’s a practical reason for this. Unlike YouTube, social media platforms don’t expose video transcripts through any standard API. Each platform requires:

  • Proprietary integrations that we build and maintain in-house
  • Server-side processing — the work happens on Sumr’s cloud infrastructure, not on your device
  • Constant maintenance as platforms change their interfaces and policies

This is ongoing engineering work with real server costs. It’s not something we can route through a user-provided API key because the expensive part isn’t the LLM call — it’s everything that happens before the text reaches the model.

Why not a per-request API?

We’ve considered offering a per-request option for BYOK users who want social media summarization without a full subscription. There are no plans for this right now, but if demand warrants it, we may revisit.

For now, the subscription is the way to unlock social media videos. It also includes follow-up questions, all future premium features, and priority support.

The bottom line

BYOK gives you a powerful, nearly-free summarization tool for the web, text, and YouTube. If you need PDFs or social media videos, subscribe. Both paths are first-class experiences in the app.