Essays on LLM cost optimization, smart routing, and building with AI — from the team behind HiWay2LLM.
The three problems — markup compounding on growth, no EU hosting, no burn-rate alerts — that pushed us from making do to building HiWay ourselves.
The Vercel AI Gateway is great for Next.js apps on Vercel. Outside that context, the integration advantage shrinks and dedicated routers become more compelling.
Ten OpenRouter alternatives ranked honestly. Each one wins for a specific use case, and we tell you which.
Five minutes, one base_url change, zero SDK rewrites. Here's the exact migration path from OpenRouter to HiWay with full code examples.
Four pricing models drive four very different gateway behaviors. Understanding which one you're buying is the difference between alignment and slow bleed.
LiteLLM self-hosted looks free until you count ops time, on-call, and feature lag. Here's the honest build-vs-buy calculation for LLM gateways.
Seven questions narrow the field from twenty options to one. A decision framework, not a product pitch, with HiWay as one answer among several.
Schrems II, sub-processors, DPAs, and the EU AI Act change the calculus on where your LLM gateway runs. Here's a precise, non-alarmist briefing.
When your LLM bill crosses $5K/month, new failure modes appear. Five patterns we've seen at scaling startups, and how to catch them before the bill does.
Every LLM provider prices by tokens, and every customer has no idea what a token costs for their specific app. Here's why this is broken.
Moving from OpenAI to Claude without rewriting your app. The two-line change that gives you provider optionality, a rollback plan, and a safety net.
Prompt caching gives a 90% discount on repeated context. Most teams run with a 20% hit rate and never realize it. Here's how to measure yours and fix it.
We routed 10,000 real production queries across all three Claude tiers and scored the outputs blind. The results justify a 70% cost cut without quality degradation.
A RAG agent stuck in a retry loop, a context window ballooning past 200K tokens, and the moment we realized no provider alerts you in time. Here's what we built.
BYOK is not a feature, it's a category shift. The managed-LLM SaaS era is ending. Here's what replaces it, and why it realigns incentives in your favor.
Providers quote $3/M tokens. You pay $8/M effective. Six hidden multipliers explain the gap, and most teams never see them coming.
A health check was pinging Claude Opus every 30 minutes. $45/day in waste. We built HiWay2LLM to fix it.