Building AI applications today comes with a hidden problem: who pays for the AI? 

Every prompt, image, or response costs money. As apps grow, developers either cap usage, charge subscriptions, or quietly pay the cost themselves. That makes scaling risky, especially for small teams.

A recent update from Chutes quietly changes this model. With the introduction of Chutes as an Identity Provider, developers can now let users log in with their Chutes account and pay for AI usage directly.

In a tweet, backend developer Jon Durbin called it “quite huge”, and he wasn’t exaggerating because this update completely changes how consumer AI apps can be built and scaled.

What is Chutes

Chutes is a decentralized, open-source, serverless AI inference platform built on Bittensor Subnet 64.

Instead of running AI models on centralized cloud providers like AWS or OpenAI, Chutes uses a network of decentralized GPU operators (miners) to run open-source models at scale. For developers, this means they can deploy models instantly without managing servers, scale automatically, and pay only for what gets used.

Today, Chutes processes trillions of tokens per month, making it one of the largest decentralized AI inference platforms in production.

The Problem Chutes Just Solved

Before “Login with Chutes,” developers building on the platform still faced a familiar issue. Every time a user sent a prompt or generated an output, the developer paid the bill.

That created constant friction. Growth became risky, free tiers were difficult to maintain, and small teams had to think about billing systems and usage caps long before their product was ready. Viral success, instead of being a win, could turn into a financial liability.

This problem isn’t unique to Chutes, it’s one of the biggest structural issues in AI today.

What “Login with Chutes” Actually Changes

With this update, Chutes can now act as an Identity Provider, similar to how users can log into apps with Google or GitHub.

When an app integrates “Login with Chutes,” users authenticate with their own Chutes account. That account already knows how to handle AI usage, quotas, and payments. When the user runs an AI task, the inference cost is charged directly to them, not the app developer.

This removes the biggest barrier to building consumer-facing AI apps.

How It Works

From a user’s perspective, nothing feels complicated. They click a login button, approve access, and start using the app.

Behind the scenes, Chutes handles authentication, permissions, usage tracking, and billing. The app just calls the same inference APIs it always did. Every request is billed against the user’s balance or subscription, automatically and transparently.

The developer doesn’t need to build custom billing logic, enforce aggressive rate limits, or worry about unexpected usage spikes.

Why This Is a Big Deal

This update changes the economics of AI apps. Instead of developers absorbing risk, AI becomes bring-your-own-compute. Users pay for what they use, while builders are free to scale without fear of runaway costs. 

That shift is especially important for consumer apps, open-source tools, and small teams that want to ship quickly without locking everything behind subscriptions from day one.

Chutes runs on Bittensor, so that means that these benefits don’t stop at the app level. Every new product built on Chutes pushes real inference demand through the network, strengthening incentives for miners and validators and directing value toward subnets that deliver genuine utility. 

Over time, this turns Bittensor from abstract infrastructure into something users interact with directly, often without realizing it’s decentralized at all.

What Comes Next?

Right now, this feature is live at the API level, with demo apps available for developers to test. More polished UI components and documentation are coming soon.

As adoption grows, this unlocks a new wave of AI products where users bring their own compute budget and developers focus entirely on experience and functionality.

But the bigger point is what this unlocks. “Login with Chutes” isn’t just a login feature, it fixes one of the hardest problems in AI apps.

By letting users bring their own Chutes account, they also bring their own compute budget, which means developers can focus on building great experiences without worrying that a sudden spike in usage will blow up their bill.​This is how decentralized AI infrastructure becomes usable at scale.