On testing a cheap LLM gateway

Fri, 23 Oct 2026 10:23:03 +0700

I wanted to see whether a cheap LLM gateway could replace OpenRouter in an AI-assisted forecasting feature we run at work. Plenty of gateways advertise the same models for much less, and switching can look as simple as changing a base URL.

The feature asks an LLM to make several judgement calls: choose a category, score the evidence, and write a verdict. I wanted to know whether changing the gateway would change those decisions. I’ll leave the cheaper gateway unnamed here.

LLM on Panji Gautama

On testing a cheap LLM gateway