Bifrost AI Gateway: Features, Pricing, Pros & Cons

Founded 2025|San Francisco, California|11-50 people|Free and open source (Apache 2.0), with an Enterprise plan priced by Maxim AI

What is Bifrost?

Bifrost is an open-source LLM gateway from Maxim AI, written in Go and licensed under Apache 2.0. It puts 1,000+ models from 20+ providers, including OpenAI, Anthropic, AWS Bedrock, Google Vertex, and Azure, behind one OpenAI-compatible API, with automatic failover, load balancing, semantic caching, and an MCP gateway for tool calls.

You run it yourself with npx, Docker, or as a Go SDK, and each deployment includes a web UI for configuration and monitoring. An Enterprise plan adds guardrails, adaptive load balancing, SSO, RBAC, and audit logs, with in-VPC, on-premises, and air-gapped deployment, at a price set by Maxim after a 14-day trial.

Bifrost exports request data through OpenTelemetry and Prometheus rather than storing and scoring it itself, and evaluation lives in Maxim's separate platform. Teams that want routing and evals on the same record often compare it with other LLM gateways that keep both in one product.

Key features

Core capabilities this platform advertises.

OpenAI-compatible API for 1,000+ models from 20+ providers
Automatic failover and load balancing
Semantic caching
MCP gateway for tool calls

Strengths and tradeoffs

What this tool does well, and the limitations to keep in mind.

Pros

Apache 2.0 license, free to self-host
1,000+ models behind one OpenAI-compatible API
Starts with a single npx command or Docker image
Semantic caching and MCP gateway included

Cons

You run, scale, and monitor the gateway yourself
Observability is exported to other tools rather than stored in the gateway
Evals live in Maxim's separate platform, priced per seat from $29/month
Guardrails, SSO, RBAC, and audit logs require Enterprise

Plans & pricing

What's included in each plan, and how the tiers compare.

Open Source

Free

Apache 2.0, self-hosted, 1,000+ models from 20+ providers, failover, load balancing, semantic caching, MCP gateway, community support

Bifrost Enterprise

Custom

Contact sales for a quote

14-day free trial, guardrails, adaptive load balancing, SSO, RBAC, audit logs, in-VPC, on-prem, and air-gapped deployment, dedicated support

View official pricing page

Common use cases

Engineering teams that want a self-hosted, open-source LLM gateway in their own infrastructure

Self-hosting an LLM gateway in your own infrastructure
Failing over between providers during outages
Cutting repeat-request cost with semantic caching
Governing tool calls through an MCP gateway

Using Bifrost with Respan

Respan is the AI router with observability and automated evals built in. Where Bifrost exports request data to other tools, Respan traces and scores every request where it's routed, so a fallback that fired and the eval score for its output sit on the same record.

One API for 1,000+ models with automatic fallbacks
Every request traced with cost and latency, with nothing to export
Evals on live production traffic, linked to each trace
Hard spend limits per key, per customer, or org-wide
Prompt versions that ship without a code deploy

Route and score every request in one place

10KFree traces/mo

1,000+Models

5 minSetup

Respan routes across 1,000+ models and traces and scores each request where it's routed, so a fallback and the eval score for its output sit on the same record. Start free.

Try Respan free

Best Bifrost alternatives & competitors

Top companies in LLM Gateways you can use instead of Bifrost.

Respan

One API for 1,000+ models