Top 5 Enterprise AI Gateways to Reduce LLM Cost and Latency

TL;DR If you're running LLM workloads in production, you already know that cost and latency eat into your margins fast. An AI gateway sits between your app and the LLM providers, giving you caching, routing, failover, and budget controls in one layer. This post breaks down five enterprise AI gateways, what each one does well for cost and latency, and where they fall short. Bifrost comes out ahead on raw latency (less than 15 microseconds overhead per request), but each tool has its own strengths depending on your stack. Why Cost AND Latency Matter Together If you're building with LLMs, you have probably already noticed that optimizing for cost alone can tank your latency, and vice versa. Switching to a cheaper model saves money but adds response time. Caching saves both, but only if the cache layer itself does not add overhead. The real win is an AI gateway that handles both problems at the infrastructure level, so your application code stays clean. You want something that can cache re