Providers & Models

Switching providers & models

Flowly remembers every provider you've configured. Flip between them — and between models within a provider — from the terminal chat in two keystrokes, no restart.

Switch provider — /provider

In the terminal chat, type /provider to open the provider switcher: an arrow-key list of every provider you've set up, including Flowly Cloud.

bash

/provider

Each row shows a live probe badge — Flowly checks the credentials in real time so you can see what's actually usable.
A ★ marks the current default.
Press Enter to make a provider active. It's saved as providers.active and applied immediately.

No key yet?

The switcher only flips between providers you've already configured. To add a new one, see Bring your own key or run /integrations.

Switch model — /model

/model opens a searchable list of the models available on the active provider. Type to filter, press Enter to select.

bash

/model

Your pick is written to agents.defaults.model and used on the next message. For providers Flowly can't enumerate, it points you at the provider's model list instead.

Provider first, then model

Models belong to a provider. Switch the provider with /provider first, then pick a model with /model — the model list reflects whichever provider is currently active.

Your choice is sticky

Once you pick a provider it stays put — Flowly won't silently swap it just because you added another key. The active choice survives across sessions until you change it.

The one exception: if your active provider becomes unusable — for example you sign out of Flowly Cloud, or remove a key — Flowly falls back down its priority order (Flowly Cloud → your BYOK keys) and warns at startup instead of failing. See how Flowly picks a provider.

You can also pin the active provider non-interactively when saving a key:

bash

flowly setup byok openrouter --set-active     # save + make default (default behavior)
flowly setup byok groq --no-set-active        # save without changing the active one

When changes take effect

Switching from the TUI (/provider, /model, /integrations) hot-reloads the running gateway, so the change lands on your next message — nothing to restart.

If you edit ~/.flowly/config.json by hand while a gateway is already running, apply it with:

bash

flowly restart