Unified model gateway
Route requests to more than 200 models from different providers through one OpenAI-compatible API, while adding or swapping models without changing application code.
FastRouter.ai
FastRouter.ai is an OpenAI-compatible API gateway with access to 200+ models, routing, failover, governance, observability, and weekly traffic-based savings recommendations.
Unified access to models and gateway operations
FastRouter.ai is a unified API gateway for teams that build and operate applications using large language models. It provides access to more than 200 models through a single OpenAI-compatible API, covering text, image, video, embeddings, and speech models. Teams can change model or provider choices without rewriting their application integration.
The gateway combines model routing with operational controls: it can select models using cost, latency, and quality considerations; retry requests; fail over between providers; and expose fallback models through virtual model lists. It also centralizes usage data, logs, alerts, access controls, budget limits, and guardrails so teams can manage model consumption across projects.
Core capabilities
Intelligent routing and cost control
Select models according to cost, latency, or output quality, and use batching and model controls to manage high-volume workloads and unnecessary premium-model usage.
Failover and reliability
Use automatic retries, provider redundancy, fallback models, load balancing, and virtual model lists to keep requests moving when a provider or model becomes unavailable.
Governance and access controls
Set project and API-key limits, budget caps, rate limits, member roles, RBAC, and guardrails that can observe or block policy violations.
Observability
Review unified metrics, activity logs, latency, errors, costs, and alerts across models, providers, and projects. Paid plans add distributed tracing and broader alerting limits.
Insights and savings analysis
Receive weekly, read-only recommendations based on routed traffic, including prompt caching, Flex-tier, eval-verified model-swap, and prompt-compression opportunities with projected savings and supporting measurements.
Practical use cases
Evaluate and switch models
Point an existing OpenAI SDK integration at FastRouter, then test or deploy different provider models without changing the application's model-access pattern. This is useful when a team needs to compare quality, latency, and cost before standardizing on a model.
Improve production resilience
Configure prioritized fallback models, provider redundancy, retries, and load balancing for an AI feature that must continue serving requests during provider errors, rate limits, or availability changes.
Operate AI across teams
Use project and API-key controls, roles, budget caps, rate limits, logs, dashboards, and alerts to give multiple teams shared model access while keeping usage and spend visible.
Find savings in existing traffic
Let Insights review qualifying routed traffic each week and prioritize changes such as prompt caching, Flex-tier routing, eval-verified model swaps, or prompt compression. Each recommendation includes evidence and a location for implementation.
Pros and Cons
Pros
- One OpenAI-compatible API provides access to more than 200 models and multiple modalities.
- Automatic retries, failover, fallbacks, and load balancing address provider outages and capacity constraints.
- Routing, governance, observability, caching, guardrails, and model evaluation capabilities are available in one gateway.
- Weekly Insights recommendations show sampled requests, savings calculations, and the surface where a change should be made.
- A free Starter plan is available, with paid tiers adding higher usage, retention, tracing, alerting, and team limits.
Cons
- The most advanced Insights recommendations are opt-in and use real tokens for their analysis; savings figures are projections based on sampled traffic rather than guarantees.
- Self-hosting is available only on the Enterprise plan, while lower tiers use FastRouter's managed cloud deployment.
FAQ
How does FastRouter fit into an existing application?
FastRouter provides an OpenAI-compatible API with access to more than 200 models. Existing OpenAI SDK-based applications can point their base URL to FastRouter and select a FastRouter model ID.
What types of models and modalities does it support?
FastRouter supports text, image, video, embeddings, and speech models through its unified API. The specific models and capabilities available depend on the providers represented in the gateway.
How does FastRouter handle provider failures?
FastRouter offers automatic retries, provider failover, fallback models, and load balancing. Virtual model lists can combine providers and models into a model alias with policy-driven selection.
What does the Insights feature produce?
The Insights feature performs a weekly, read-only analysis of qualifying traffic and returns ranked recommendations with sampled requests, savings calculations, and a named place to make each change. Free insights cover prompt-caching and Flex-tier recommendations; advanced insights are opt-in and use real tokens for model-swap and compression analysis.
Is there a free plan, and what does it include?
Starter is free forever and includes the core gateway, 200+ models, auto-routing, fallbacks, retries, load balancing, RBAC, budget caps, rate limits, and 200,000 logs per month with seven-day retention. Paid plans add higher limits and capabilities such as response caching, tracing, guardrails, and expanded observability.
Quick Facts
- Category
- LLM gateway and AI infrastructure
- API style
- OpenAI-compatible API
- Model access
- 200+ models across providers
- Supported modalities
- Text, image, video, embeddings, and speech
- Deployment
- Managed cloud; self-hosting available on Enterprise
- Insights workflow
- Weekly, read-only traffic analysis with ranked recommendations
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