The short version
For two years the pitch for an AI gateway was some version of "cheaper tokens". That pitch is dead. As of August 2026 the major gateways all charge the same thing for tokens — nothing — and the entire contest has moved to a place most buyers never think to look: the platform fee. This is a report on where that money went, and who quietly won while the loudest arguments were happening somewhere else.
Start with the fact that reframes everything. According to a fee comparison maintained by LLM Gateway and corroborated against each vendor's own pricing page, Vercel AI Gateway, OpenRouter, Portkey, LiteLLM, Cloudflare and Kong now all pass provider token rates through at 0% markup. The token itself has become a commodity that no serious gateway marks up.
There are two visible exceptions, and both prove the rule. Requesty still charges a flat 5% on token cost and says so plainly. OpenRouter charges 5.5% — but on credit purchases, not on tokens, which is a platform fee wearing a markup's clothes. Everyone else competes on what they wrap around the token, not the token.
Once tokens are free, the gateway's real price is whatever it charges to govern those tokens — the routing, the spend caps, the logs, the per-team budgets. And here the vendors diverge sharply, because they meter completely different things.
This is the part that makes "which gateway is cheapest" an unanswerable question until you name a workload. A gateway that is nearly free for a low-traffic team with heavy observability needs can be the most expensive option for a high-traffic team that logs everything.
| Gateway | Token markup | Platform fee — and the unit it meters |
|---|---|---|
| Cloudflare AI Gateway | 0% | Core features free on all plans; 5% only if you use its unified billing |
| LiteLLM (self-hosted) | 0% | $0 software. You pay infrastructure. Per-team budgets are free |
| Vercel AI Gateway | 0% | Free on tokens; governance (ZDR, provider allowlist) $0.10 per 1,000 requests each |
| Portkey | 0% | $49/month including 100k logs, then +$9 per additional 100k logs |
| OpenRouter | 0% | 5.5% on card credit purchases ($0.80 minimum); BYOK free to 1M req/mo |
| Kong | 0% | Konnect: 1M requests/month free, then $200 per additional 1M; AI Gateway $100/model-month |
| Requesty | 5% | Markup is the fee — no separate platform charge |
Read that column of units again. Cloudflare charges nothing at the core. LiteLLM charges nothing and hands you an infrastructure bill instead. Vercel meters requests, but only the ones you tag for governance. Portkey meters logged records. Kong meters raw requests. OpenRouter meters money loaded. Comparing them means picking one workload and running it through all six formulas.
So we did the arithmetic. Take 50 million requests a month — a mid-size production workload — and price it through each gateway's published rates. This is derived from vendor pricing pages, not from any single person's screenshot.
Two of these numbers reconcile exactly with the vendors' published rates. Portkey at $49 plus $9 per 100k logs above the first 100k lands at roughly $4,549 for 50M logs. Kong Konnect at $200 per million requests after the first, plus AI-gateway model fees, lands at exactly $10,300. Those are the honest anchors.
Two others we deliberately corrected. A widely-shared version of this comparison quoted Cloudflare at "$7" and Vercel at "$3,750". Neither matches the published rate: Cloudflare's AI Gateway core is free, and Vercel's own $0.10-per-1,000-requests governance fee produces about $5,000 if you tag every request, not $3,750. We use the published-rate figures.
The practitioner conclusion doing the rounds — "self-host LiteLLM, because per-team budgets are free there and behind a sales call everywhere else" — is directionally right and worth taking seriously. Whether it is right for you depends on the break-even we worked through in OpenRouter vs LiteLLM: below roughly $10k/month of spend, the fee is cheaper than the engineer.
While developer social feeds argued about pricing tables, the most consequential release of the window happened almost silently. On 23 June 2026, Envoy AI Gateway reached v1.0 General Availability — its first stable release, after roughly 16 months of development.
What makes this matter is not the version number, it is the provenance. Envoy AI Gateway is built on the CNCF Envoy Gateway and the Kubernetes Gateway API Inference Extension, and it was co-developed with Bloomberg, whose engineers sit among its maintainers. The named early adopters are serious infrastructure shops: LY Corporation, Alan by Comma Soft, and the National Research Platform. Maintainers also come from Tetrate, Tencent, Netflix, Nutanix and AMD.
The v1.0 release ships a full MCP gateway — server multiplexing, tool routing and filtering, CEL-based authorization — plus quota-aware, multi-tenant routing across sixteen providers. This is a gateway built to be governed by the same Kubernetes control plane a large org already runs, which is exactly why it barely registered on a platform optimised for individual developers. Mention-count would have missed it entirely. Production-adoption signal did not.
One caveat on our side: we could confirm that Nutanix engineers maintain the project, but not the stronger claim that Nutanix has folded Envoy AI Gateway into a shipping "Agent Gateway" product. We flag that rather than assert it.
The one genuine defection story of the month came from Bifrost, a Go gateway licensed Apache 2.0. Reports circulated of teams switching off LiteLLM and citing dramatic latency wins, and Bifrost's own published benchmarks claim roughly 11 microseconds of overhead at 5,000 requests per second, against a Python-proxy comparator measured in milliseconds.
Then the cold shower arrived, and it is the most useful thing published all month. An independent analysis by DeepInspect, dated 14 July 2026, pulled the benchmarks apart. Its argument, which we think is correct:
We also corrected two stale numbers from the circulating brief while we were here. Bifrost's current published 500-RPS figures are P99 1.68 seconds versus 90.72 seconds for LiteLLM — not the "520ms versus 28,000ms" some write-ups still quote — and even those are mock-upstream results. Read every gateway latency benchmark, including the ones we just cited, as a vendor artefact until someone measures end-to-end against a live provider.
The practical read: latency is a real reason to pick Bifrost or Envoy only if you are running high-RPS production traffic and already measuring proxy tail latency as a problem. For everyone else it is a benchmark that looks decisive and changes nothing a user will feel. DeepInspect adds a caveat worth keeping: Envoy AI Gateway has published no data-plane overhead benchmark at all — only a control-plane scaling one — so its latency story is unproven either way.
Because project momentum gets quoted loosely, here are the live numbers as of today, checked against the repositories rather than repeated from a roundup.
| Project | Stars | Open issues | Language | Licence | Note |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| LiteLLM (BerriAI/litellm) | ~53,800 | ~1,500 | Python (+ a June 2026 Rust proxy) | MIT | 100+ providers; still the default |
| Bifrost (maximhq/bifrost) | ~5,600 | ~230 | Go | Apache 2.0 | The performance challenger; read its benchmarks skeptically |
| Aurora (aurorallm/aurora) | ~14 | — | Go | Open source | Too new to rank; tagline claims "55× faster than LiteLLM" |
Note what the circulating brief got wrong, because it is instructive. It quoted LiteLLM at "56K stars and 4,861 open issues". The stars are actually about 53,800, and the open-issue count is roughly 1,500, not 4,861 — that larger number appears to be Bifrost's commit count, transposed. When a figure looks alarming, check the repository before you repeat it. We nearly did not.
| If your priority is… | Look at | Because |
|---|---|---|
| Lowest cost at scale, minimal governance | Cloudflare AI Gateway | Core is free; you pay providers directly and get caching, rate limits and analytics on top |
| No vendor pricing floor, full control | LiteLLM self-hosted | Per-team budgets are free; every managed rival gates them behind a plan or a sales call |
| High-RPS traffic already hitting tail latency | Bifrost | Genuinely fast Go proxy — but benchmark it on your own traffic, not the vendor's mock |
| Kubernetes shop, Envoy already in the mesh | Envoy AI Gateway | v1.0 GA, MCP gateway, quota-aware routing, governed by your existing control plane |
| Deep prompt management and log-level observability | Portkey | Real product here — just remember it meters logs, so price it at your log volume |
| Widest model catalogue, lowest effort | OpenRouter | Still the broadest reach; watch the 5.5% credit fee on large spend |
The through-line: since the token is free everywhere, choose on the fee unit that matches your shape. Meter-on-requests hurts high-traffic apps. Meter-on-logs hurts heavy-observability teams. Meter-on-spend hurts big bills. Self-hosting removes the fee and adds an engineer. There is no universally cheapest gateway anymore — only the one whose meter runs slowest against your particular workload. Our gateway guide works through those fee models in detail, and the live landed prices sit on our comparison page.
We think stating a method is part of being trustworthy, so here is ours, including what we could not do.
Every pricing figure above is derived from the vendor's own published rate, not from a screenshot or a single social post. Where a widely-circulated number failed to reconcile with the published rate — Cloudflare's "$7", Vercel's "$3,750", Bifrost's "520ms vs 28,000ms", LiteLLM's "4,861 open issues" — we corrected it and said so. GitHub figures were read from the live repositories on 10 August 2026.
What we could not verify: individual social-media posts, including the specific practitioner threads this analysis was partly prompted by. X posts are not reliably checkable, so we treated their claims as leads to verify against primary sources, not as evidence in themselves. Public Reddit API access returned errors across the developer subreddits during this window, so there is no r/LocalLLaMA or r/LLMDevs signal here. This piece rests on vendor documentation, GitHub, the Envoy and DeepInspect publications, and the LLM Gateway fee comparison.
Mostly no. Vercel, OpenRouter, Portkey, LiteLLM, Cloudflare and Kong all pass provider token rates through at 0% markup. The exceptions are Requesty, which charges a flat 5% on tokens, and OpenRouter, which charges 5.5% but on credit purchases rather than tokens.
Platform fees, metered in four incompatible units: a markup on tokens (Requesty), a fee on credit top-ups (OpenRouter), a charge per logged record (Portkey), and a charge per request (Kong, and Vercel's governance features). Cloudflare's core is free, and LiteLLM is free software you host yourself.
Derived from published rates: Cloudflare's core is free, LiteLLM costs only its infrastructure, Portkey lands around $4,549, Vercel around $5,000 if every request is tagged for governance, and Kong reaches $10,300. OpenRouter's 5.5% credit fee scales with spend rather than request count.
No. Cloudflare AI Gateway's core features are free on all plans, so at 50M requests the gateway itself is effectively free. The "$7" that circulated does not match any published AI Gateway rate. Its only standing charge is a 5% fee if you opt into unified billing.
Envoy AI Gateway is an open-source gateway built on the CNCF Envoy Gateway and the Kubernetes Gateway API. It reached v1.0 GA on 23 June 2026, co-developed with Bloomberg, with LY Corporation, Alan by Comma Soft and the National Research Platform as named early adopters. It matters because it lets a Kubernetes org govern AI traffic through the same control plane it already runs.
Some reported doing so. But the headline latency numbers come from Bifrost's own benchmarks against a mock upstream, and an independent analysis by DeepInspect argues that methodology inflates the gap. Bifrost is a genuinely fast Go proxy, but treat the "40× faster" framing as a vendor artefact until it is measured end-to-end.
Rarely. Gateway overhead runs from a few microseconds to low tens of milliseconds, against provider time-to-first-token of 500 milliseconds to five seconds. Unless you are at high RPS and already measuring proxy tail latency as a problem, the gateway is not your bottleneck.
About 53,800 as of 10 August 2026, with roughly 1,500 open issues. A widely-repeated "56K stars / 4,861 open issues" is wrong — the issue count appears to be Bifrost's commit total transposed.
The Kong Gateway core is open source under Apache 2.0. The enterprise AI plugins and Konnect management plane are paid: Konnect gives the first million requests a month free, then charges around $200 per additional million, plus AI-gateway model fees. That is what produces the $10,300 figure at 50M requests.
It depends on volume. Self-hosting removes the fee and per-team budgets are free, but it adds infrastructure and on-call. Below roughly $10,000/month of model spend the managed fee is usually cheaper than the engineering time; above it, self-hosting pulls ahead.
Public Reddit API access returned errors across the targeted developer subreddits during this window, so there is no r/LocalLLaMA or r/LLMDevs signal here. The analysis rests on vendor documentation, GitHub, the Envoy and DeepInspect publications, and a maintained fee comparison instead.
Aurora is a very new open-source Go gateway claiming to be "55× faster than LiteLLM". As of this writing it has around 14 GitHub stars — too early to evaluate or recommend, and its performance claim is unverified.
The AI gateway market grew up this year. When everyone charges zero for tokens, "cheaper tokens" stops being a strategy, and the real product — governance, routing, observability, control — finally has to compete on its own terms. That is good for buyers, as long as you understand that the price tag moved to a place the marketing does not point at.
So the discipline for the rest of 2026 is simple. Ignore the token line, because it is identical everywhere. Find the fee unit — requests, logs, top-ups or an engineer's salary — and price it against your actual workload. Discount latency benchmarks until someone measures them end-to-end. And notice that the most important release of the summer was an enterprise Kubernetes gateway almost nobody tweeted about, which is a decent reminder that the loudest signal and the most important one are rarely the same thing.
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