Guides

Written guides

The catalogue answers what each product does. These answer the questions that come before that: whether you need a gateway at all, which one fits the job you are actually doing, and what it will cost on top of the tokens.

All guides

  1. 01 I keep seeing the term. What is it, and what is it not? What is an LLM gateway? A plain definition of an LLM gateway, and how it differs from a router, a proxy, a traditional API gateway and an MCP gateway — five terms vendors use interchangeably and should not.
  2. 02 Just tell me which one to use. Best LLM gateways in 2026 There is no single best LLM gateway. Five common jobs — self-hosting, fastest start, HIPAA, the Vercel stack, one hyperscaler — and the product we would pick for each, with the deciding figures linked.
  3. 03 What will this actually cost me on top of the tokens? How LLM gateway pricing works Token markup, credit top-up fees, per-seat pricing and BYOK are four unrelated charging models sold under one word. What each costs, and which one wins at your spend.

Or skip the reading

The guides are opinions with their evidence attached. If you would rather work from the evidence directly, three tools do the same job without the prose.

Find your fit

Six questions about your constraints, then a filtered shortlist that shows why each product was ruled in or out.

Compare side by side

Any two products, every field, differences highlighted — plus written verdicts on the pairs people actually weigh up.

Estimate the cost

Your volumes and team size against all 20 products, broken into named lines with assumptions flagged.

How these are written

Each guide carries a named byline and a published and updated date read from that page's own revision history, not from the last site deploy. The opinions are hand-written and labelled as opinions. The figures inside them are not written down at all: they render from the catalogue at build time with their source links and check dates attached, so an argument and its evidence cannot drift apart.

Nobody pays to be included, recommended or ranked, and there are no affiliate links. The methodology sets out what is scored and what this site deliberately refuses to score; about says who writes it.