One LLM gateway instead of five vendor contracts
Using multiple AI providers means juggling separate contracts, invoices, and API keys for each one. An LLM gateway acts as a single middleman that handles all of them at once. It also gives you a clear view of where your AI spending actually goes.
Teams building AI-powered products often rely on models from several companies — OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, and others — at the same time. Each provider comes with its own contract, billing cycle, and API key, making it hard to get a clear picture of total costs or to negotiate better deals. An LLM gateway sits in front of all those providers. Your app talks to one gateway, and the gateway routes requests to whichever model is appropriate. This consolidation brings procurement down to a single vendor relationship and surfaces token usage and cost breakdowns across every model in one dashboard, making it much easier to spot expensive features and cut waste.
Key points
- A single LLM gateway lets you manage multiple AI providers through one interface
- Multiple vendor contracts collapse into one, simplifying procurement and billing
- Unified dashboards show token usage and cost per model or feature
- Easy to identify which parts of your app cost the most and optimize them
- Automatic fallback to another model if one provider goes down becomes straightforward
Quick term guide
- API keys
- Secret codes that let one app or service access another service.
- API key
- A private code that lets a service know which account is using it.
- LLM gateway
- A middleware layer that sits between your app and multiple AI model providers, so you only need to connect to one place.
- models
- Different AI engines that can power answers or code suggestions inside a tool.
- surface
- Here it means a distinct channel or interface where users encounter information, such as a search results page or an AI chat answer.
- dashboard
- A screen that shows key information like usage and cost in one place.
- Interface
- The visual parts of a program that a human interacts with.
- fallback
- When the first choice is unavailable, the system automatically switches to a backup option instead