An open-source gateway is one you run on your own infrastructure. There is no vendor in the request path, no per-request fee, and no third party holding your prompts. You get the source under a named licence and take on operating it: deployment, upgrades, availability and whoever gets paged at three in the morning.
What this category is
This category exists because for some organisations every other answer is disqualified before price is discussed. Regulated data that cannot leave the network, an air-gapped environment, or a flat institutional refusal to add a third party to the request path all lead here. The absence of a vendor is the feature.
The licence matters more than it usually does. These products range from permissive MIT and Apache-2.0 through copyleft AGPL-3.0 to open-core arrangements where the repository is real but the features you actually wanted are in the commercial tier. Each is a different long-term commitment, and the one that bites later is discovering the governance feature your auditor asked for sits behind the licence boundary.
Why you cannot compare these prices with the others
The catalogue records these as no fee, and every cost model on this site says so. That figure is honest about the vendor and silent about you: it excludes the compute you provision, the availability you engineer, and the engineer-time you spend, which is usually the largest number of the four. Treat a zero here as "no vendor invoice", never as "free".
The pricing guide works
through all four charging mechanisms — token markupMarkup: A percentage the gateway adds on top of what the model actually costs. Some charge none at all and make money elsewhere.MarkupA percentage the gateway adds on top of what the model actually costs. Some charge none at all and make money elsewhere., credit feesCredit or top-up fee: A cut taken when you add money to a prepaid balance, typically around 5%. Easy to miss because it is not a markup on tokens — but you pay it on every dollar you load.Credit or top-up feeA cut taken when you add money to a prepaid balance, typically around 5%. Easy to miss because it is not a markup on tokens — but you pay it on every dollar you load., per-seat, and self-hostedSelf-hosted: You run the software on your own infrastructure. No third party sees your traffic, and there is no vendor fee — but you own the uptime, the patching, and the upgrades.Self-hostedYou run the software on your own infrastructure. No third party sees your traffic, and there is no vendor fee — but you own the uptime, the patching, and the upgrades. — with figures computed at four real
workloads, and the cost estimator runs the same
model against your own volumes.
When this is the wrong category
If you have no platform team and no appetite to acquire one, a hosted product is genuinely cheaper. The self-hosted option only wins when running infrastructure is already something you do well.
AI proxy plugins for the Apache APISIX API gateway, adding LLM routing and token limits to an OpenResty data plane.
US company
Cost above the model bill
Self-hosted
No license cost at all; you run APISIX and its etcd control store on your own infrastructure. The docs are co-branded with API7, a commercial vendor offering a supported distribution, whose pricing is not published on these pages.
Models
—
across 10–20 providers
Failover
Logs
Guardrails
Best for Teams already running APISIX that want basic multi-provider LLM proxying, retries and token-based rate limiting without adding another gateway.
Open-source AI gateway and Python SDK that puts one OpenAI-compatible API in front of many LLM providers.
US company
Cost above the model bill
Self-hosted
OSS is free (MIT); you pay only for your own containers plus Postgres and Redis. Enterprise features (SSO, RBAC, JWT auth, SCIM, audit logs, support SLAs) require a paid LiteLLM commercial license whose price is not published.
Models
—
count not published
Failover
Spend limits
Logs
Semantic cache
Guardrails
Best for Platform teams that want a free, self-hosted, maximally broad provider abstraction with virtual keys and budgets, at moderate request volumes.
AGPL-licensed OpenAI-compatible gateway available as one self-hosted Docker image or a hosted service with credit fees.
US company
Cost above the model bill
5% to top up
No markup on tokens, fee applies when you add funds
Models
~200
across ~40 providers
Failover
Spend limits
Logs
Caching
Guardrails
Best for Small teams that want an OpenRouter-style hosted gateway with a genuine zero-cost self-host escape hatch and no token markup.
The other four categories
Products are sorted by what they actually are, not by what they are marketed as.
If none of the above is the shape of your problem, one of these probably is.
There is no vendor fee, which is not the same thing. You still pay for the compute it runs on, the redundancy that keeps it available, and the engineering time to operate and upgrade it. The cost estimator on this site shows an infrastructure assumption for these products and flags it as an assumption rather than a quoted price.
Which open-source gateways can run air-gapped?
Several, but not all, and the difference is material for classified or regulated deployments. Air-gap support is a recorded field on every product page, taken from vendor documentation and linked to the page stating it. A blank means it was not published, not that the answer is no.
Does an open-source licence mean every feature is free?
No. Open-core products publish a genuine repository while keeping some capabilities — often the governance, SSO or audit features — in a paid tier. The licence field names the actual licence so you can tell a fully permissive project from an open-core one before you build on it.