OpenRouter vs LiteLLM

LiteLLM is an open-source gateway that unifies provider APIs. OpenRouter is a hosted multi-provider aggregator with its own catalog and billing. Both solve access; neither holds budget envelopes or proves savings per use case. o10 sits above either as the spend control plane.

No. Keep OpenRouter or LiteLLM for model access. o10 adds shadow-mode proof, eval-gated routing (o10/auto, o10/frontier, o10/squad), KYI governance, and an immutable ledger in the request path. Most teams run both — gateway for developers, control plane for FinOps.

Shadow mode mirrors live inference traffic through o10 without changing production routes. For every request, o10 evaluates candidate models against your per-use-case quality floors and records which route would have been cheapest and compliant — along with the cost delta — while the original provider still serves the response. Engineering sees proof without production risk; finance gets a verified savings figure tied to your traffic, not industry averages. Most teams run shadow for 7–14 days segmented by use case (support, RAG, code, batch) before flipping enforce mode.

Enforce mode places o10 in the request path. On every call, o10 selects the cheapest eval-passing model within your budget envelope before the request reaches the provider. Failed eval candidates are never routed. Each enforced call writes an immutable ledger entry: model, venue, and fully loaded cost. Jurisdiction and data-residency venue controls are on the roadmap — not enforced today. Enforce without shadow proof is possible but discouraged — shadow establishes trust with engineering and finance first.

Savings are verified against your own shadow baseline per use case — not industry averages or vendor marketing claims. o10 mirrors a week or more of production traffic, segments by workload, and compares what you actually spent versus what you would have spent on the cheapest eval-passing route at the same quality floor. Finance signs off on the delta before enforce mode flips. Gainshare pricing ties o10 fees to this verified number, so savings must be real and auditable.

Know Your Inference (KYI) is a governance framework by Shen Pandi that scores inference systems across five weighted pillars: Performance (25%), Economics (25%), Integration (20%), Strategy (20%), and Risk (10%). Each pillar scores 0–100; the composite rolls into a confidence level and board-signable recommendation. KYI runs continuously in the o10 control plane — not as a one-off audit — so every routed call and eval updates the score. A composite floor of 65 triggers enforcement levers: cap, rightsizing, or sunset per policy.

o10 unifies routing across per-token API gateways (unified inference gateway), OpenRouter (multi-provider aggregator), Amazon Bedrock (per-token and committed capacity), and owned or open-weight infrastructure. A single control plane sits above all venues — you do not need separate dashboards per provider. o10 selects the cheapest eval-passing route per call and holds budget envelopes. Committed Bedrock drawdown and open-weight routing are first-class venues, not afterthoughts.

Most stacks connect o10 in shadow mode within a day: point traffic through the control plane, segment by use case, and start the verified savings clock. Enforce mode follows after per-use-case eval equivalence is proven — typically one to two weeks for enterprises with multiple workloads. No six-week gateway migration is required; o10 sits above existing gateways and clouds. KYI scoring and the immutable ledger stay live from day one in shadow.

Choose o10 when you need verified savings (not estimates), CFO-grade ledgers per use case, eval-gated routing to cheapest compliant models, and board-signable KYI governance — not just API proxying or post-hoc dashboards. If your gateway already covers access and your spend is stable with clear unit economics, shadow mode still quantifies whether routing leaves money on the table.

A quality floor is the minimum eval score a model must achieve for a specific use case before o10 routes production traffic to it. Floors are per workload — support, RAG, code, and batch clear at different bars — and measured by replaying representative traffic through eval suites, not assumed from vendor benchmarks. Once a cheaper candidate passes the floor, o10 can route to it in shadow (proof) or enforce (live). Floors without evals are hopes; evals without floors are expensive defaults.