I was totally against you until this, but it’s an interesting idea. Its still early, but seems like OpenAI hasn’t succeeded any more to be broad consumer product past the core Chat experience. Building an AI OAuth platform would be an interesting way to be sticky and avoid being a commodity. But it’d give developers more leverage vs their custom-GPT product, and it’d shift charging per-use for an API to “unlimited” per month for a single subscription fee.
Generally, a product shouldn’t tie themselves to an API provider (eg OpenAI) when it could’ve been an implementation detail. If you hide the actual API from users, you can swap it for cheaper or better ones as the market evolves. If you give up the account access to a providers OAuth, and you give up control over that implementation, you risk being really stuck to a market loser and no direct relationship with users.
Getting paid for it though…. That would be an interesting twist. But I’m not sure it’d make sense as anything but a bulk discount. The problem is that it doesn’t make sense to pay a developer to use your paid product, unless you get a relationship with the end users like Google Search defaults in browsers. But again, it doesn’t make sense to give OpenAI that relationship if you don’t have to.
And the issue should really be inverted: it's not about excluding less technically savvy users - it's about recognizing a market niche of more sophisticated users, that really want that feature, can likely pay more for it, give you word-of-mouth marketing for free if you execute well. It's a niche so underserved that you don't even have to compete with scammers and shovelware all that much.
TypingMind.com is a "bring you own API key" (obviously, being a LLM frontend), that's also successfully monetizing users. The secret is that it's actually a very good product; until recently, it was far ahead of the official tools (I mean, they had plugins for like half a year before OpenAI started talking about "GPTs"), so paying for the license feels worth it (definitely was, when TypingMind was strictly better than ChatGPT Plus subscription).
It's also not a subscription - another reason "bring your own keys" apps are interesting, because you likely already have a paid subscription with the API vendor; adding another one on top of that needs some good justification.
Anyway, "bring your own key" users are a different market from general audience, and unlike the latter, it isn't already saturated with fly-by-night garbage and scam extensions, so you can both charge more for that feature, and have smaller costs marketing it.
Why do you need to monetize? The original comment you replied to talked about making something for the world and sharing it. They said they didn’t want to maintain it, they didn’t want to be obligated to care for it. You can’t make that choice if people are paying you (or at least shouldn’t…).
I don’t understand the BYOx use case for a monetized product. If you’re BYO api, you’re essentially missing the opportunity to monetize a spread on API requests. The more a customer uses your product (because it’s good), the more you’d make. That’s the best case scenario because it means everyone is finding value.
Some people, myself included, are trying to earn a living creating software that helps people in some way. Just like any other physical or digital service, it’s fair to charge for a useful tool
> I don’t understand BYOx use case for monetised product
In my case, BYO keys turns out way cheaper for the end user. For instance my tool calls an LLM API. If I were to host the keys myself, I’d be charged $X for Y calls.
By getting the user to bring their own key, in my case the user easily fits into the free tier of the LLM (Gemini in my case) so the product costs me $0 to run, and I just charge a small service fee for me having created the product.
This allows me to keep building useful tools, some free (7 of 8 projects so far) and some paid (1 of 8)
Also, subscriptions are a garbage business model from the user perspective, it's literally a dark pattern. They make sense for things with recurring costs to provide, but for instance, I should be able to buy a copy of Cursor and plug my key in and use it forever, and only shell out if I want upgrades. It's a subscription service because they're trying to bleed their users dry, and I'm sick of it.
Will probably update it in the coming weeks with one that can use LLMs through openrouter (Claude and others). I'm testing that now and fills forms in < 5 sec, usually better than existing tools (roboform, Bitwarden, ect).
So it's also "bring your own keys" but then how do you monetize at all?
I personally don't like "bring your own keys" at all from a user-friendlyness perspective. It means that you exclude the vast majority of potential users, because they don't know what that even means. Even "create an account" is more user friendly.