Cloudflare AI Gateway — LLM Gateways Platform
LLM GatewaysLayer 1FreemiumWhat is Cloudflare AI Gateway?
Cloudflare AI Gateway is a unified API gateway for AI applications that provides observability, caching, rate limiting, and cost tracking across multiple LLM providers. Available on all Cloudflare plans, the core gateway features are free with no per-call fees beyond the Cloudflare subscription. The platform connects popular providers like Workers AI, Hugging Face, OpenAI, and Anthropic with a single line of code, offering centralized visibility and control. Built into Cloudflare global network infrastructure, AI Gateway provides edge-level caching, request retries, model fallbacks, and analytics. The free tier includes 100,000 AI Gateway logs per month, while the Workers Paid plan starting at USD 5/month provides 1 million logs. In 2026, Cloudflare introduced Unified Billing, allowing customers to pay for third-party model usage directly through Cloudflare invoices. While the platform excels at cost-effectiveness and integration with Cloudflare existing services, it adds 10-50ms of proxy latency, lacks deep AI observability features like token-level tracing, and enforces strict log retention caps that can require manual management at scale.
Key Features
- ✓Edge-deployed AI gateway
- ✓Caching and rate limiting
- ✓Usage analytics
- ✓Provider failover
- ✓Cloudflare network integration
Pros & Cons
Pros
- +Core features free with Cloudflare plans—no per-call gateway fees
- +Tightly integrated with Cloudflare global network for low-latency routing
- +One-line integration for major LLM providers
- +Built-in caching, rate limiting, and fallbacks improve reliability
Cons
- -Adds 10-50ms proxy latency to every request
- -Lacks token-level tracing and prompt analysis
- -Strict log retention caps require manual management at scale
- -No enterprise governance features like RBAC or audit trails
Cloudflare AI Gateway Pricing
Free trial available
- ✓100,000 logs/month
- ✓Core gateway features
- ✓Caching and rate limiting
- ✓Basic analytics
- ✓Included with Cloudflare plan
- ✓1 million logs/month
- ✓10M requests included
- ✓30M CPU-ms included
- ✓USD 0.30 per 1M additional requests
- ✓Custom log retention
- ✓Advanced features
- ✓Dedicated support
- ✓SLA guarantees
Common Use Cases
Cloudflare users who want to add AI gateway capabilities to their existing edge infrastructure
- •Edge caching for AI API calls
- •Rate limiting AI usage per user
- •Cost management for AI APIs
- •Global AI traffic management
- •Cloudflare ecosystem AI integration
Using Cloudflare AI Gateway with Respan
Cloudflare AI Gateway and Respan provide complementary AI infrastructure. Route requests through Cloudflare while gaining deeper observability with Respan.
- ✓Combine Cloudflare edge caching with Respan token-level cost attribution
- ✓Use Cloudflare for infrastructure while Respan provides AI-specific analytics
- ✓Track prompt quality and model performance beyond Cloudflare basic metrics
- ✓Monitor AI costs across teams and projects with Respan detailed breakdowns
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Last verified: March 9, 2026