Beyond Direct APIs: LLM Gateways Become Essential Infrastructure

As AI applications scale beyond simple single-provider setups, direct API integrations become brittle and difficult to maintain. LLM gateways have emerged as critical infrastructure that abstracts provider details, enabling dynamic model switching, cost tracking, monitoring, and fallback strategies. The variety of options—from OpenRouter's simplicity to Portkey's production focus to LiteLLM's infrastructure control—reflects fundamental tradeoffs developers must weigh when choosing their routing layer.