We’re a 3-person team building AI agents. Got rate limited by Anthropic during a live customer demo last month. Claude is our primary model. But relying on a single provider with no fallback was dumb and we knew it. Just kept putting it off. Set up Bifrost gateway ( OSS ) as a reverse proxy. Route all Claude calls through it. If Anthropic returns a 429 or 5xx, it automatically sends the request to our OpenAI fallback. Our app code didn’t change at all, just pointed the base URL to localhost:8080. Two things I actually like beyond failover: Budget cap per API key. We set $30/day during dev so nobody’s testing loop burns through credits overnight. The thinking parameter works. We use extended thinking with Claude and it passes through correctly since their v1.3.0 update. Setup took maybe 15 minutes. It’s a single Go binary, runs with npx or Docker. submitted by /u/Otherwise_Flan7339
Originally posted by u/Otherwise_Flan7339 on r/ClaudeCode