Use custom models on remote sessions

When the Kilo App shipped at the start of July, remote sessions ran Kilo Gateway models only. That was the one caveat in the launch post, and it turned out to be the thing people wrote to us about most: they were already paying for a ChatGPT subscription or a provider key, and they wanted the session on their phone to use it.

From Kilo CLI 7.4.2, it does. A session you expose with /remote now advertises its own model catalog, and the picker lists whatever your machine has configured — in the Kilo App and in Kilo Cloud. Local models through Ollama or LM Studio. A self-hosted endpoint. A custom model registered under provider..models. A ChatGPT Plus or Pro subscription over OAuth. If your CLI can use it, you can select it from your phone.

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Nothing moves

The session keeps running in your terminal or your editor. The model call happens on your machine with your credentials, and the app is a control channel into it. That’s why this works without a new credential stored anywhere: your provider config never leaves your laptop.

It’s also why Cloud sessions work differently. A Cloud Agent runs on Kilo’s infrastructure, which can’t read a provider config or an OAuth token sitting on your machine, so Cloud sessions run Kilo Gateway models.

Use BYOK for Cloud sessions

Cloud sessions can still run on your own provider credentials. Add a BYOK key to the Kilo Gateway at the account or organisation level, and requests for that provider’s models route through your key rather than ours, with the usage landing on your provider account. That includes the models a provider’s coding plan gives you. Models where a BYOK key is available show a BYOK badge in the picker.

What BYOK can’t do is reach your machine. A model in Ollama or LM Studio, or a self-hosted endpoint on your own network, is only available to a session running there. That’s a remote session, not a Cloud Agent.

Set it up with a ChatGPT…