Every few weeks a new AI gateway appears on my radar, and every one tells the same seductive story: “Stop paying too much for LLMs. One endpoint, adaptive routing, zero markup. You’ll cut your bill 40%.”
I keep almost believing it. Whenever I do, I pull the price sheets — not the homepage claims, the per-token numbers. That exercise keeps saving me from a mistake, and it’s a repeatable enough pattern that it’s worth writing down. If you run any kind of LLM routing layer, you’ve probably heard this pitch and wondered if you’re leaving money on the table.
