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Show HN: Subpool – Self-hosted AI subscription management for teams

Subpool, a self-hosted AI subscription management tool for teams, was released on Hacker News as a Show HN project. The open-source Go service pools authorized subscription and API accounts, allocates employee-specific keys, and exposes an OpenAI-compatible API without storing conversation content. It requires Docker Engine and Docker Compose and is licensed under Apache License 2.0.

read2 min views1 publishedSep 2, 2026
Show HN: Subpool – Self-hosted AI subscription management for teams
Image: Michielbdejong (auto-discovered)

Enterprise AI subscription quota allocation and governance, self-hosted.

Subpool is a self-hosted control plane for allocating, governing, and auditing AI subscription capacity across teams. Administrators combine authorized subscription and API accounts into pools, distribute employee-specific keys, monitor remaining quota, and expose one consistent API without storing conversation content.

  • Pool authorized subscription and API capacity behind one managed endpoint.
  • Allocate employee-specific keys across healthy provider accounts.
  • Monitor account health, remaining subscription capacity, and reset availability.
  • Keep key-to-account assignments visible and auditable.
  • Prefer subscription capacity and fall back to paid API accounts with the same employee key.
  • Rate-limit, expire, and revoke employee access independently.
  • Expose OpenAI-compatible Responses and Chat Completions APIs.
  • Track aggregate input and output usage per API key.
  • Encrypt upstream credentials and never persist prompts, responses, or source code.

Subpool is a single Go service with an embedded React console and PostgreSQL persistence.

Requires Docker Engine and Docker Compose.

cp .env.example .env

openssl rand -base64 32
openssl rand -base64 32
openssl rand -hex 32

docker compose up -d --build

Replace every replace-with-*

value, then open http://localhost:8080 and sign in with the administrator credentials from .env

.

  • Open Accounts and connect a Codex or OpenAI-compatible account. - Create a pool and add the account.
  • Create an employee API key for the pool.

Codex subscriptions use device-code authorization. Copy the one-time code from Subpool, continue to OpenAI, and confirm it there. This works on remote and headless deployments without a localhost callback or an extra exposed port. Device-code login must be enabled in ChatGPT security or workspace settings.

Configure Codex CLI:

model = "gpt-5.6-sol"
model_provider = "subpool"
model_reasoning_effort = "xhigh"

[model_providers.subpool]
name = "Subpool"
base_url = "https://subpool.example.com/v1"
wire_api = "responses"
experimental_bearer_token = "sk-example-not-a-real-key"
requires_openai_auth = false

Available endpoints include POST /v1/responses

, POST /v1/chat/completions

, GET /v1/models

, GET /healthz

, GET /readyz

, and GET /metrics

.

  • Terminate TLS at a reverse proxy and set SUBPOOL_PUBLIC_URL

to the public origin. - Back up PostgreSQL together with SUBPOOL_CREDENTIAL_KEY

andSUBPOOL_API_KEY_HMAC_KEY

. - Use PostgreSQL for shared authentication, rate-limit, assignment, and health state across replicas.

See .env.example for configuration options.

docker compose up -d --build
make web-install
make dev

Before opening a pull request:

make web-test
make web-build
go test ./...

Subpool is licensed under the Apache License 2.0. It is independent and self-hosted. Use only accounts you are authorized to manage, and review each upstream provider's terms before sharing access.

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