Bring-your-own-key, not another subscription
Every few months another "all AI models in one place" product shows up, and almost all of them work the same way: you pay them a subscription, and they resell access to Claude, GPT-4, Gemini and friends at a markup. That's a reasonable business, but it's not the only way to build this, and it's not the way ai.findnix.eu works.
AI Hub is a bring-your-own-key portal: you paste in your own Anthropic, OpenAI, Google, Mistral, Stability AI, ElevenLabs and Runway keys, and the portal just gives you one consistent interface — chat, image generation, text-to-speech, a code assistant, video generation — over whichever of those you've connected. Billing happens directly between you and the provider. The portal itself charges nothing for API usage, because it never touches the money side at all.
Keys are the one thing that has to be paranoid
The whole trust model of a BYOK product rests on one thing: can users believe their API keys — which are effectively bearer tokens for their own paid accounts — are safe. Every key is encrypted with AES-256-GCM before it touches the database, with a unique nonce per key (so two identical keys never produce identical ciphertext, which matters for preventing pattern analysis against the stored blobs). The master key lives in a config file that's explicitly blocked from direct HTTP access at the nginx level, as a second layer independent of PHP actually executing the file correctly.
