AI gateway
A service that sits between your software and many AI providers, so you can switch models without rewriting code or juggling accounts.
An AI gateway is a middleman, in the useful sense. Rather than signing contracts with OpenAI, Anthropic, Google and half a dozen others, and writing separate code for each, you point your software at the gateway and choose a model by name. One account, one bill, one interface. If a cheaper model appears next month, or a provider has an outage, you change a string instead of rewriting an integration.
The best-known example is OpenRouter, which offers more than 400 models to roughly 8 million developers, and which Stripe agreed to buy in August 2026 for a reported sum above 7 billion dollars. That price says something about the position: whoever runs the gateway sees which models are actually being used, meters the consumption and sends the invoice. The trade-off is one more company between you and the model, with its own view on which options get shown first.