I was running an AI agent startup with 3 people. Our API costs hit $2,400 last month. Needed governance fast. Tested these 5 gateways for budget controls and rate limiting:
- Bifrost
- What I actually use now. Set daily budgets per feature ($50 dev, $200 prod). When limits hit, requests stop. Saved me from a $800 runaway loop last week. Also does automatic failover when OpenAI goes down. Setup took 20 minutes. Free and open source.
- Portkey
- Enterprise-focused. Good governance but felt like overkill for our size. Pricing starts at $500/month. Passed.
- LiteLLM
- Popular but slow. Added 40ms latency to every request. We’re optimizing for speed so this hurt. Budget controls exist but basic.
- LLM Router
- Lightweight but governance features are limited. No hierarchical budgets. Fine for simple use cases.
- OpenRouter
- Managed service, easy setup. But no self-hosting option and governance is per-key only. Needed more granular control. Went with Bifrost. Been running it for 2 months. Costs dropped 35% from better routing. Zero surprise bills. submitted by /u/Otherwise_Flan7339
Originally posted by u/Otherwise_Flan7339 on r/ArtificialInteligence
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