What is Respan Gateway?

Respan Gateway is a unified AI gateway that connects your application to over 1,000 AI models through a single endpoint. Rather than just routing requests, it keeps production AI reliable with built-in fallbacks, retries, caching, spend limits, alerts, and full trace observability for every call. Gateway, observability, evals, prompt management, monitors, and cost controls all run on one platform, so you do not need to stitch together five separate tools to debug production issues.

Who it's for

• AI engineering teams that need to manage multiple model providers without rewriting integration code for each one.
• Platform operators who must enforce cost controls, rate limits, and security policies across different teams and environments.
• Production reliability engineers who require full observability into every API call, including latency traces and customer-level filtering.

Key features

Unified routing with fallback and retry

Route OpenAI-style calls through Respan to 500+ models, or keep each provider’s native SDK on a passthrough endpoint. If a model errors or rate-limits, the gateway automatically tries the next model in your fallback list, balances load across keys, and retries with backoff from one place.

Cost controls and caching

Set soft warnings or hard caps per API key, and get Slack or email alerts when a threshold crosses. Cache repeat prompts to cut cost and latency, with options like cache_by_customer to prevent one user's answer from being returned to another.

Full observability with trace trees

Each gateway call becomes a trace tree with latency on every span. Add customer_identifier and metadata, then filter Logs and Traces by feature, tenant, or thread. This eliminates the common gap where logs lack context for debugging.

Flexible deployment options

Point your client at https://api.respan.ai/api/, add provider keys, and ship. Choose between a router (one OpenAI-style base URL) or passthrough (native Anthropic/Gemini URLs) while still logging every request automatically.

What stands out

"Respan keeps production AI reliable and under control with fallbacks, retries, caching, spend limits, alerts, and full traces for every call."

Most AI gateways handle routing but leave observability, cost controls, and prompt management as separate tools. Respan combines all six capabilities—gateway, observability, evals, prompt management, monitors, and cost controls—on one platform. This means you can set a fallback model, enable customer-aware caching, and trace a slow request from a single dashboard, without stitching together five different services.

Worth checking out if…

You are building or maintaining a production AI application that calls multiple model providers, and you need to move beyond basic routing to enforce cost limits, debug latency issues, and ensure reliability without juggling separate tools for each concern.