LiteLLM — LLM Gateways Platform

LLM GatewaysLayer 1Open Source

Founded 2023|San Francisco, California|11-50

What is LiteLLM?

LiteLLM is an open-source AI Gateway developed by BerriAI with 18,000+ GitHub stars, enabling unified access to 100+ LLM APIs through OpenAI-compatible format. Founded as a Y Combinator company with USD 1.6 million in seed funding, LiteLLM is trusted by companies like Rocket Money, Samsara, Lemonade, and Adobe. The platform provides retry and fallback logic, cost tracking, guardrails, and load balancing with MIT licensing for the core proxy. While the open-source version is free, running LiteLLM requires infrastructure costs of USD 200-500 monthly plus DevOps labor, monitoring tools, and incident response. The Enterprise version at USD 30,000 annually adds SSO, RBAC, and team-level budget enforcement. Users praise LiteLLM's unified API interface and security through open-source auditability, but note production complexity with latency overhead (20-40ms) and operational burden for self-hosting.

Key Features

✓Open-source LLM proxy
✓OpenAI-compatible API for 100+ providers
✓Budget management and rate limiting
✓Self-hostable
✓Automatic retries and fallbacks

Pros & Cons

Pros

+Free open-source core with MIT license
+Unified interface to 100+ LLM providers
+18k+ GitHub stars with strong community
+Trusted by major enterprises

Cons

-Hidden operational costs (USD 200-500/mo infrastructure)
-Production latency overhead (20-40ms typical)
-Enterprise features require USD 30k annual fee
-Operational burden for self-hosting teams

LiteLLM Pricing

Free trial available

Open SourceUSD 0perpetual

✓MIT license
✓Proxy server
✓100+ LLM APIs
✓Cost tracking
✓Basic features
✓Self-hosted

Infrastructure CostsUSD 200-500per month

✓Cloud hosting
✓DevOps labor (USD 1.5-2k/mo)
✓Monitoring tools (USD 200-800/mo)
✓Incident response

EnterpriseUSD 30,000per year

✓SSO (Single Sign-On)
✓RBAC
✓Team-level budgets
✓Compliance features
✓Enterprise support

View official pricing page

Common Use Cases

Engineering teams who want an open-source, self-hosted LLM proxy for provider management

•Self-hosted LLM gateway for data control
•Standardizing LLM access across teams
•Budget enforcement per team or project
•Provider migration without code changes
•Open-source LLM infrastructure

Using LiteLLM with Respan

Integrate LiteLLM's open-source gateway with Respan for unified access to 100+ LLM providers. Leverage LiteLLM's retry logic and fallback capabilities alongside Respan's orchestration. Combine open-source flexibility with enterprise-grade reliability for production AI applications.