Self-Hosted AI Gateway: Route OpenAI, Anthropic & Gemini Through One API

What Is a Self-Hosted AI Gateway?

A self-hosted AI gateway is a proxy that sits between your application and multiple AI provider APIs (OpenAI, Anthropic, Gemini, xAI), letting you route all LLM requests through a single endpoint with unified authentication, cost tracking, and observability — running on your own infrastructure instead of a third-party SaaS.

Temps ships an AI Gateway as a built-in feature — no separate service to deploy, no additional bill. It runs inside the same Rust binary that handles your deployments, analytics, and error tracking.

TL;DR: The Temps AI Gateway is an OpenAI-compatible proxy built into the Temps self-hosted PaaS. It routes requests to Anthropic (Claude), OpenAI (GPT/o-series), Google Gemini, and xAI (Grok) through one endpoint, with per-request cost tracking stored at 1/10,000th-cent precision. Provider API keys are encrypted with AES-256-GCM. Temps is Apache 2.0 and free to self-host; Temps Cloud costs ~$6/mo (Hetzner cost + 30% margin, no per-seat fees).

The Problem: AI Operational Sprawl

According to Kong, 72% of enterprises plan to increase GenAI spending in 2025. The average monthly AI spend already hits $85,521 according to CloudZero. And most teams can't answer "which model is burning through our budget?"

Here's what happens without a gateway:

• 4+ API keys scattered across env vars, Vault secrets, and team Slack DMs
• 4+ billing portals with different invoicing cycles
• No cross-provider cost view — you can't answer "how much did our AI features cost last month?"
• No per-user or per-feature attribution — was it the chatbot or the code reviewer that burned $3,000?
• Key rotation nightmares — changing one key means updating 12 services

Temps AI Gateway vs Portkey, Helicone, and LiteLLM

The core difference: Temps embeds the gateway in the same process as deployments, analytics, error tracking, and uptime monitoring. You don't run a separate service, don't pay a separate bill, and don't log in to a separate dashboard.

How the Temps AI Gateway Works

The gateway exposes three OpenAI-compatible endpoints:

POST /api/ai/v1/chat/completions   → Chat (Anthropic, OpenAI, Gemini, xAI)
POST /api/ai/v1/embeddings         → Embeddings (OpenAI)
GET  /api/ai/v1/models             → List available models

Every request flows through this pipeline:

1. Authentication — Bearer token from your Temps API key
2. Model routing — Model name prefix determines the provider (claude-* → Anthropic, gpt-*/o1/o3/o4 → OpenAI, gemini-* → Google, grok-* → xAI)
3. Request translation — OpenAI-format request gets translated to each provider's native API format
4. Upstream call — The gateway makes the actual API call with the encrypted provider key
5. Response normalization — Provider response is normalized back to OpenAI format
6. Usage logging — Tokens, latency, cost (stored at 1/10,000th-cent precision), model, and provider are recorded to a TimescaleDB hypertable

The gateway overhead is under 10ms. The bottleneck is always the upstream provider, never the proxy.

Supported Providers

Routing is by model name prefix — case-insensitive. Unknown prefixes return a ModelNotFound error.

One-Line Integration: Just Change the Base URL

If your code already calls OpenAI, switching to the Temps gateway takes one line:

import openai

client = openai.OpenAI(
    api_key="tk_your_temps_api_key",
    base_url="https://your-temps.example.com/api/ai/v1",
)

# Routes to Anthropic automatically based on model prefix
response = client.chat.completions.create(
    model="claude-sonnet-4-6",
    messages=[{"role": "user", "content": "Explain TCP vs UDP"}],
)

Same code, same SDK, same types. Works with any OpenAI-compatible SDK — Python, TypeScript, Go, Rust, curl.

import OpenAI from "openai";

const client = new OpenAI({
  apiKey: "tk_abc123",
  baseURL: "https://your-temps.example.com/api/ai/v1",
});

// Four providers, one endpoint, one API key
const anthropic = await client.chat.completions.create({
  model: "claude-sonnet-4-6",
  messages: [{ role: "user", content: "Hello" }],
});

const openaiModel = await client.chat.completions.create({
  model: "gpt-4o",
  messages: [{ role: "user", content: "Hello" }],
});

const gemini = await client.chat.completions.create({
  model: "gemini-2.5-flash",
  messages: [{ role: "user", content: "Hello" }],
});

Bring Your Own Key (BYOK)

Don't want to store provider keys in Temps? Pass them per-request via X-Provider-Api-Key header:

curl https://your-temps.example.com/api/ai/v1/chat/completions \
  -H "Authorization: Bearer tk_your_temps_key" \
  -H "X-Provider-Api-Key: sk-ant-your-anthropic-key" \
  -d '{"model": "claude-sonnet-4-6", "messages": [...]}'

BYOK keys are ephemeral — used for the request and never stored. System-configured keys are encrypted at rest with AES-256-GCM (via the aes-gcm Rust crate, same encryption layer used for deployment environment variables).

Usage Analytics: Know Where Every Token Goes

Every request through the gateway gets logged with full metadata:

• Provider and model — which model handled the request
• Token counts — input and output tokens
• Latency — end-to-end response time in milliseconds
• Cost — estimated cost at 1/10,000th-cent precision (stored as total_cost_microcents)
• Credential type — was this a system key (admin-configured) or BYOK?
• Streaming flag — was the response streamed?
• Tags — arbitrary labels like team:platform, feature:chatbot, env:staging

The dashboard provides:

• Summary cards — total requests, tokens, cost, average latency, error rate
• Timeseries charts — requests and tokens over time with hourly/daily bucketing
• Per-model breakdown — which models cost the most, which are fastest
• Per-provider view — compare Anthropic vs OpenAI vs Gemini at a glance

Tag-Based Cost Allocation

Pass tags via the x-tags header to attribute costs to teams, features, or environments:

curl ... \
  -H "x-tags: team:ml-ops, feature:code-review, env:production" \
  -d '{"model": "claude-sonnet-4-6", ...}'

Then filter your analytics by any tag combination. Finally answer: "How much does the code review feature cost us per month?"

OpenTelemetry Integration: Trace Every AI Call

Temps includes a built-in OpenTelemetry collector. Combine the AI Gateway with OTel GenAI semantic conventions for end-to-end traces of every AI interaction:

• Which user triggered the request
• What the input and output messages were
• How long the model took to respond
• Token usage and estimated cost
• Thinking blocks and tool calls (for Anthropic Claude)

The AI Activity tab in your project dashboard shows these traces as a conversation view — system prompt, user messages, assistant responses, tool calls, and reasoning/thinking blocks rendered inline.

from opentelemetry import trace

tracer = trace.get_tracer("my-ai-app")

with tracer.start_as_current_span("chat claude-sonnet-4-6"):
    response = client.chat.completions.create(
        model="claude-sonnet-4-6",
        messages=[{"role": "user", "content": "..."}],
    )

Setting Up the Temps AI Gateway: 3 Steps

Step 1: Configure Provider Keys

In the Temps dashboard, go to AI Gateway and add your provider API keys. Each key is encrypted with AES-256-GCM before being written to the database. The dashboard validates the key format and tests connectivity before saving.

No CLI command required for this step.

Step 2: Get Your Temps API Key

bunx @temps-sdk/cli api-key create --name "ai-gateway" --role admin
# → tk_abc123...

This is the same API key you use for deployments and the CLI — no new credentials to manage.

Step 3: Point Your Code at the Gateway

import openai

client = openai.OpenAI(
    api_key="tk_abc123",
    base_url="https://your-temps.example.com/api/ai/v1",
)

That's it. Four providers, one endpoint, one API key.

What Teams Build With This

AI-powered support bots — Route customer queries to the cheapest model that meets quality thresholds. Track cost per conversation.

Code review pipelines — Use Claude for code analysis, GPT for documentation generation, Gemini for test generation. See which step costs the most.

RAG applications — Embeddings through OpenAI, retrieval-augmented generation through Anthropic. One endpoint, unified cost tracking.

Multi-model comparison — A/B test models by sending identical requests to different providers and comparing quality vs cost vs latency.

Internal AI tools — Give every team access to AI without sharing raw API keys. Track usage per team via tags.

Frequently Asked Questions

Does a self-hosted AI gateway add latency?

The Temps AI Gateway adds under 10ms overhead — including authentication, request translation, and response normalization. The bottleneck is always the upstream provider (typically 200–2000ms), never the proxy.

Can I use the gateway without storing my API keys in Temps?

Yes. Use the X-Provider-Api-Key header to pass your key per-request (BYOK mode). It's used for that request only and never stored. System-configured keys are encrypted with AES-256-GCM.

Does streaming work through the gateway?

Yes. All four providers support streaming via "stream": true. The gateway translates SSE chunks between provider formats — Anthropic's message_delta events are normalized to OpenAI's delta format.

How is the AI Gateway priced?

The AI Gateway is included in Temps at no extra charge. You pay your provider API costs directly (OpenAI, Anthropic, etc.) — Temps adds zero markup. On Temps Cloud, it's included in the ~$6/mo plan. Self-hosting is free under the Apache 2.0 license.

Can I see the actual conversation messages in traces?

Yes. Instrument your app with OpenTelemetry GenAI semantic conventions and the AI Activity tab shows full conversation threads — system prompts, user messages, assistant responses, tool calls, and thinking blocks.

Which AI providers does Temps support?

Temps routes by model name prefix: claude-* → Anthropic, gpt-*/o1/o3/o4/text-embedding-* → OpenAI, gemini-* → Google, grok-* → xAI. Custom OpenAI-compatible endpoints are also supported.

Start Using It Today

The AI Gateway ships with the latest Temps release. If you're already running Temps, update to the latest version and configure your provider keys in the dashboard.

If you're new to Temps, get started in under 5 minutes:

curl -fsSL https://get.temps.sh | sh

One binary. Deployments, analytics, error tracking, monitoring, and a built-in AI gateway. No SaaS sprawl required. Apache 2.0, free to self-host.

Links:

• AI Gateway documentation
• OpenTelemetry tracing guide
• Temps GitHub