I have been building side projects with AI APIs for about 6 months now.
Like most devs, I started with OpenAI, then Anthropic when Claude got good at coding, then got curious about DeepSeek because the pricing was insane.
The multi-provider headache
The problem: juggling 5 different API keys, 5 billing dashboards, and writing fallback logic when one provider goes down.
Here is what I actually measured (100 requests each, non-streaming):
| Provider | Avg Latency | P99 Latency | Uptime |
|---|---|---|---|
| GPT-5 | 2.1s | 8.2s | 99.7% |
| Claude Sonnet 4.6 | 1.9s | 7.1s | 99.9% |
| DeepSeek V3 | 0.9s | 4.5s | 98.2% |
| Qwen 3 | 1.2s | 5.8s | 99.1% |
For coding tasks, Claude is fastest and most reliable. For Chinese-heavy tasks, DeepSeek wins by a mile.
What I ended up doing
I switched to a unified API gateway that calls all models through one endpoint. One key, one bill, auto-fallback.
👉 Try it free (100 credits): https://global-apis.com?ref=ga_1d685276035684e33fb90700d87bca244c298f10eb58ed80c52e6696838a3b87
Disclosure: affiliate link. I get a commission if you subscribe, but I genuinely use this and it solved my problem.
What setups are other indie devs using for multi-model routing?
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