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What is an LLM gateway?
Last reviewed July 16, 2026
An LLM gateway is a single API endpoint that routes requests to many model providers. Your code speaks one format (commonly the OpenAI API shape) and names a model; the gateway handles provider authentication, request translation, failover between providers, and unified billing, so switching models never means rewriting integrations.
What a good gateway handles
Beyond routing: automatic failover when a provider degrades, price-aware provider selection when a model is served by several, consistent streaming behavior, spend controls and per-key permissions, and clear errors for unsupported fields instead of silent drops. The gateway is infrastructure; its job is to be boring and predictable.
Gateway or direct provider APIs
Direct integration makes sense for one provider and maximal control of provider-specific features. A gateway wins as soon as you use two or more providers, want failover, or want one bill: the integration cost stops scaling with the provider count.
idapt's gateway exposes the whole catalog on OpenAI-compatible, Anthropic-compatible, and OpenRouter-compatible endpoints, with cheapest-first routing, failover, BYOK, and workspace-level governance.
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