Feature Idea: “Bring Your Own Compute” (BYOC) Subscription Credits
As ChatGPT and Codex expand capabilities that can leverage a user’s local or remotely accessible PC, I think there’s an interesting opportunity for a Bring Your Own Compute (BYOC) pricing model.
The concept is simple: if a user voluntarily allows eligible AI workloads to utilize their personal computer’s processing capacity, electricity, and hardware—reducing some portion of the compute that would otherwise need to occur on centralized infrastructure—OpenAI could provide subscription discounts or usage credits in return.
This could be entirely opt-in and based on measurable local resource utilization. For example, qualifying compute could generate credits applied toward a ChatGPT subscription or additional usage.
There could be benefits on both sides:
- Users receive value for providing their own hardware and electricity.
- OpenAI potentially reduces some centralized compute and energy demand.
- Local hardware that would otherwise sit idle becomes useful capacity.
- Users have an incentive to adopt local and remote-PC capabilities.
- OpenAI could potentially create a distinct BYOC tier for power users.
Obviously, security, verification, hardware differences, and determining the actual value of local compute would need to be solved.
But the underlying principle seems worth exploring: if customers can meaningfully offset infrastructure costs by supplying some of their own compute, share a portion of those savings with them.
I’d be interested to hear whether others think a BYOC model could work—and what a fair credit system might look like.