Building Optlo, an AI support agent that runs on your own OpenAI, Anthropic or Gemini key. Also founded HelpHero.

Jonas Budelmann • Peerlist

Every AI support tool I looked at had the same shape: the vendor holds the model account, you pay per resolution, and the actual token cost is invisible to you. As a buyer that annoyed me. As a builder it looked like margin in the wrong place.So Optlo doesn't sit in that path. You bring an OpenAI, Anthropic or Google Gemini key that belongs to your company. Inference is billed to you by the provider, at their rates, against limits you set in their console. We charge a flat subscription for the software and take nothing on tokens.That one decision forced three things to be built differently:Model choice had to be per-step, not global. If you are paying for the tokens, you should be able to run something cheap on intent detection and something expensive on the reply.Flows had to be inspectable. An agent spending your money on your key cannot be a black box, so every step in a conversation is something you can open, edit and audit.Connectors had to be real. The agent calls Stripe or any HTTP API mid-conversation to look up an order, instead of deflecting the customer to a form.The rest is what you would expect: a widget, a knowledge base built from your own pages and docs, replies in the customer's language, and handoff to a human with the thread intact. It answers on your website, so there is no ticketing and it is not a helpdesk replacement.$19/month covers 500 conversations and one seat, $59 covers 2,000 and three. The 7-day trial needs no card and includes AI usage, so you can try it before wiring up a key.Happy to answer anything about the architecture or the pricing model.