Lesson 19 of 19 · ~5 min
Connect your own data keys
You'll learn: How to bring your own upstream provider API keys (AccuWeather, Ticketmaster, and more), validate and rotate them, and understand how signals fall back to shared quota if a key fails.
Bring-your-own-keys (BYOK) is a Pro-and-above feature. On lower tiers, signals run on SignalGuard's shared quotas and there's nothing to configure.
01 Why bring your own keys
Several signals sit on paid upstreams — premium weather, ticketing, and others. Out of the box they run on SignalGuard's shared quota, which is fine for normal use. Connecting your own key for a provider gives you your own rate limits and entitlements (for example minute-by-minute precipitation or lightning tiers your plan includes), so a busy event night doesn't compete with anyone else's quota.
02 Add a provider key
Open Integrations (also reachable from Settings). Each supported provider has a row where you paste your key. On save, SignalGuard validates the key against the provider before storing it, so you find out immediately if it's wrong — you're not left guessing until the next scan. Keys are stored encrypted and scoped to your workspace.
byok-integrations.png
03 Rotate or disconnect
When you rotate a key with the provider, paste the new value over the old one — it's re-validated on save. Disconnecting a key removes it and returns that signal to the shared quota. Nothing else in your setup changes; only which credential the signal uses.
04 Fallback behavior
Your key is used first. If it fails — expired, over quota, provider outage — the signal falls back to the shared quota rather than going dark, so a bad key never blanks a card mid-event. That makes BYOK safe to adopt incrementally: connect one provider, confirm it, then add the next.
Tips
- Validation runs on save — a green result means the key really works, not just that it was stored.
- Keys are encrypted and workspace-scoped; disconnecting cleanly reverts the signal to shared quota.
- Adopt one provider at a time and confirm each before moving on — fallback means you can't break a live event by trying.