A managed LLM gateway is worth its cost in two situations: almost always when it is priced per log or per seat, and only below a spend threshold when it takes a percentage of your model spend.

Log-priced gateways are cheap relative to engineering time. Portkey's Production plan, for example, works out to about $130 a month at one million logged requests. That is less than two hours of a fully loaded US engineer.

Percentage-fee gateways scale with your bill. At a 5.5% platform fee, a managed gateway costs more than self-hosting once your monthly model spend passes roughly $35,000 if self-hosting would take 20 hours a month of US engineering time, or roughly $13,000 if that work is done at offshore rates (illustrative; infrastructure excluded).

Above those lines, self-hosting an open-source gateway, using your own provider keys, or negotiating an enterprise contract usually costs less.…