LiteLLM alternative
A LiteLLM Alternative for Teams with No One to Host It
LiteLLM is MIT licensed, reaches more than 140 providers, and costs nothing beyond the servers you run it on (October 2026). Its Enterprise tier is priced by quote. The software is excellent. Hosting it, upgrading it, and reading its spend logs is a job in its own right.
With Cascadia you get
- No server for you to run
- Nothing installed on your machines
- Every request logged
- Spend caps agreed with you
- Fallback when a provider fails
- A written monthly report
Cascadia vs LiteLLM at a Glance
Three Questions That Decide It
Who Would Host and Upgrade the Proxy?
Must Prompts Stay on Your Own Servers?
What Do You Want Each Month?
Side by Side
| LiteLLM | Cascadia | |
|---|---|---|
| Price | Free to self-host, Enterprise by quote | –$79 a month per organization |
| Hosting | –Yours, on Docker, Kubernetes, or Helm | Nothing to host |
| Data location | Stays on your infrastructure | –Passes through the gateway, explained first |
| Providers | More than 140 through one API | –The providers your applications use |
| Budgets and rate limits | By key, user, and team | Per application, agreed with you |
| Caching and fallbacks | Built in, you configure them | Configured and watched by us |
| Upgrades | ×Yours to apply | Not your concern |
| Monthly report | ×Build it from the data | Written, by application |
Price
Hosting
Data Location
Providers
Budgets and Rate Limits
Caching and Fallbacks
Upgrades
Monthly Report
What Ships in the Standard Plan Here
LiteLLM gives you virtual keys, budgets, caching, fallbacks, and guardrails in one open source proxy. It also gives you a service to host, keep running, and upgrade as new releases ship.
- Nothing installed, hosted, or upgraded on your side
- The gateway put in front of the providers you already use
- The prompt, reply, model, and cost logged on every request
- Spend caps and per-application rate limits set with you
- Caching, so the same answer is not paid for twice
- Fallback and retries when a provider has an outage
- Ninety days of history you can search
- A monthly report of spend by application
- Your provider keys and your logs remain yours
- One price of $79 a month per organization
Where Cascadia Goes Further
LiteLLM can do nearly everything our gateway does. The difference is where it runs and who keeps it running.
No Server to Keep Alive
Self-hosting with Docker, Kubernetes, or Helm is well documented. It still means a machine that has to stay up, because when the proxy stops, every AI call behind it stops too.
Budgets Set by Someone Reading the Logs
LiteLLM tracks spend by key, user, team, and organization. We go a step further and decide with you what each application ought to be allowed to spend.
A Report You Did Not Have to Build
The data is all there in a LiteLLM deployment. Turning it into a monthly summary that someone outside engineering can follow is the part that tends never to happen.
Upgrades Are Not Your Problem
Nothing runs on your infrastructure, so there are no versions to track, no release notes to read, and nothing to patch on a Friday afternoon.
Who This Comparison Is For
Teams Whose Prompts Must Stay In-House
LiteLLM runs on your own infrastructure, and its site says it collects no telemetry. If prompts can never leave your network, that is the honest answer, and we will say so.
Teams with a Platform Engineer
If someone already runs containers in production, LiteLLM is a small addition, and the open source version costs nothing.
Teams Without One
A proxy that sits in the path of every AI call needs an owner. Without one, a self-hosted gateway becomes the single point of failure it was supposed to remove.
Choose LiteLLM if
- Prompts must stay on your own servers
- A platform engineer will own the proxy
- You want it free and open source
Choose Cascadia if
- Nobody can host and upgrade a proxy
- You want caps set by someone watching
- You want spend explained each month
Moving Off a Self-Hosted LiteLLM Proxy
Your applications already call a proxy rather than the providers, so the switch is an endpoint change. Your proxy keeps running until the new path has proved itself.
- 1
We Read Your Current Setup
Which providers, virtual keys, and budgets exist, what caching and fallbacks are configured, and what an ordinary month costs.
- 2
We Set Matching Caps with You
Limits per application are agreed on a call, using what your budgets already say as the starting point.
- 3
Applications Move One at a Time
Each application is pointed at our endpoint in turn. Your provider keys stay yours throughout.
- 4
You Switch the Proxy Off When Ready
Once the reports cover a full month and nothing depends on the old proxy, you shut it down. Until then it stays exactly where it is.
What Clients Say About Working with Cascadia
“I’ve always dreaded website management, but Cascadia has done an incredible job with my WordPress site, making it one less thing for me to worry about.”
“I’ve worked with Cascadia for several years now. They are always ready to help in any way I ask and can implement my ideas with ease. A company that values their clients!”
“Cascadia has been great to work with! We recently needed some updates, and Cascadia was quick to get them completed! We highly recommend Cascadia Web Services.”
“Cascadia is very responsive and we’re happy with them as our primary IT vendor.”
“They do great work, been using for years. Prompt responses to requests.”
Ready to Stop Hosting LiteLLM?
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LiteLLM Alternative Questions
Straight answers about hosting, data, and what changes when you switch.
See AI GatewayStill have a question?
What is a LiteLLM alternative?
Any other gateway between your applications and their AI providers. That includes hosted products such as Portkey and Helicone, routers such as OpenRouter, other open source gateways such as Bifrost, and managed services like ours where nothing runs on your side.
Is LiteLLM free?
The open source gateway is MIT licensed and free. You pay for the servers it runs on and the time it takes to look after it. Enterprise adds SSO, SCIM, audit logs, and 24/7 support with response-time SLAs, priced by quote (October 2026).
How is Cascadia different from LiteLLM?
LiteLLM is software you deploy. We are a gateway you never deploy at all. The logging, caps, caching, and fallback are much the same idea. What differs is that we set them, watch them, and report on them every month for $79 a month per organization.
Should we just self-host instead?
If you have someone who wants to own it, quite possibly. A self-hosted proxy is cheap in money and expensive in attention. If nobody can give it that attention, it will be set up once and then left, which is the situation a gateway was meant to fix.
Where does my data go?
This is the real trade. With LiteLLM on your own servers, prompts stay inside your network. With us, prompts and responses pass through the infrastructure the gateway runs on. We explain exactly what that means before anything is switched on, and if it rules us out, we tell you.
Do my applications need code changes?
Only the endpoint they call. They point at our gateway instead of your proxy, your provider keys stay yours, and you can point them back at any time.
How long are logs kept?
Ninety days, with the prompt, the reply, the model, the cost, and the application that made the call, searchable in your portal.
What happens when spending spikes?
Caps agreed with you are enforced at the gateway, rate limits hold per application, and you are told before a budget is reached rather than after.
How quickly does setup start?
Within two business days, with the first full picture inside a week. Your LiteLLM proxy can keep running the whole time.
Ready to hand the gateway over?
$79 a month per organization, nothing to host, 90 days of logs, and a person here who sets the caps and writes up the month. It is also part of AI Pro at $189 a month.