Originally published on AI Tech Connect.
The short version If you call more than one model, or you plan to, you will eventually build a gateway whether you mean to or not. The only choice is whether you build it deliberately or accrete it as a mess of retry loops, environment variables and half-finished cost dashboards scattered across your services. Three tools dominate the deliberate route, and they are not really competitors — they are three different answers to the same question. LiteLLM is the self-hosted proxy. Open-source, MIT-licensed, one OpenAI-compatible API in front of 100+ providers. You run it, you scale it, you own the operations — and because it sits inside your own network, it adds minimal overhead. OpenRouter is the hosted aggregator. One API and one bill across hundreds of models from dozens of providers. You…
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