Blog
How smart routing actually works.
Long-form, no fluff. Architecture diagrams, real config, honest comparisons. Written by the engineers who ship Gateway-LLM.
What is an LLM Gateway? A 2026 Engineer's Guide
An LLM gateway is the routing, governance, and observability layer that sits between your application and every LLM provider. Here's what's inside one, why it matters, and how to evaluate them.
How Smart Routing Cuts LLM Costs by 40–70% Without Quality Loss
A walkthrough of prompt-complexity classification, tier-based routing, and the worked token math that turns a $40k OpenAI bill into a $14k one — with no measurable change in output quality.
LiteLLM vs Gateway-LLM: A Performance & Architecture Comparison
Honest comparison of two open-source LLM gateways — Python vs Go, plugin smart routing vs first-class smart routing, deployment shape, latency overhead, and the operating costs neither readme talks about.
Virtual API Keys: How to Govern LLM Spend Across Teams
A practical guide to issuing per-team virtual API keys with rate limits, model allowlists, and hard budget caps — without ever rotating your provider credentials.
Semantic Caching for LLMs: When It Works, When It Hurts
A pragmatic guide to semantic caching for LLM responses — embedding similarity thresholds, cache invalidation, and the failure modes that produce confidently-wrong answers.
Failover Across OpenAI, Anthropic, and Google: A Production Pattern
A copy-paste production pattern for cross-provider LLM failover — preferring one provider, draining to another in microseconds, and never going down because of one vendor's outage.