LiteLLM — LLM Gateways Platform

Founded 2023|San Francisco, California|11-50 people|Open Source

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

Core capabilities this platform advertises.

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

Strengths and tradeoffs

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

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

Plans & pricing

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

Open Source

Perpetual

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

Infrastructure Costs

$200-500

Per month

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

Enterprise

$30,000

Per 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.