You're probably wondering what these "API keys" are. You can think about it like you're plugging in your own ChatGPT account into Skudio to use AI features. For our purposes, API keys are a set (or just a single key) of cryptographic passwords you will use to securely access ChatGPT models and image hosting providers. OpenAI (ChatGPT) API keys are acquired through a separate account from your normal ChatGPT account, you can create an OpenAI API platform account on platform.openai.com, this is where you will add credit to gain access to AI usage. Adding credit to your OpenAI API account is required to enable AI features within Skudio. While many of Skudio's features are able to be used natively offline, the magic really happens when you plug in AI.

You can choose from imagekit.io (our reccomended image host provider), imgbb, cloudinary, or set up your own custom URL endpoint (advanced) to host your images. All of these image hosting services have very generous free account options, and you'll likely never have to pay to use the image hosting services. By choosing to require users to provide their own API keys, we are enabling you to have access to image hosting and AI features at the lowest possible cost to you. We'd otherwise have to charge additional fees for AI tokens and image hosting, adding a crazy amount of overhead to your business. This is NOT part of our mission.