Gateway or direct API access: which to choose

The choice between direct provider access and working through an intermediary usually comes down to price. Price matters, but it is not the only difference and not always the decisive one.

Direct access

A contract with the provider: an account at Anthropic or OpenAI, your own card, your own limits.

What you get. No extra link in the chain: when something breaks, the provider is responsible and fixes it. Access to new capabilities the day they ship, without waiting for an intermediary to support them. Official support and a meaningful SLA at volume.

What you pay. List price with no wholesale terms. The need for a payment method the provider accepts, which in some countries is a project of its own. And handling limits yourself: raising them goes through the provider and is not always quick.

Through a gateway

The intermediary holds the contract with the provider; you call it with an ordinary API key.

What you get. A price below list, thanks to wholesale purchasing. Payment by whatever method is available to you. One key and one balance across models from different providers — comparing and switching stop requiring separate accounts.

What you pay. Dependence on the intermediary: their availability becomes yours, and their mistake becomes your incident. A delay in support for new features: something the provider ships today appears at the intermediary later. And the fact that your requests travel through someone else's infrastructure.

What to check in an intermediary

If you go with a gateway, four things matter more than price.

Billing by actual use. Charges should track the tokens you really consumed, not a subscription or prepaid packs. The provider returns the token count in the usage field of every response — compare it against what your usage history shows.

A request history. The ability to see what you were charged for without writing to support.

Protocol compatibility. If the API matches the original, moving back costs a two-line config change. That is your insurance: as long as leaving is cheap, the dependence is manageable.

Transparent pricing. A price list available before registration, and no hidden markups — asymmetric rates, minimum per-request billing, charges for things the provider gives away.

How to decide

Direct access makes sense when volumes are large, a payment method exists, and same-day support for new capabilities matters.

A gateway makes sense when you need a working tool now, when paying directly is not possible, or when you want to compare models from different providers without opening an account with each.

A middle path works too: direct access for production and a gateway for experiments, or the other way round. Since the protocol is the same, switching costs a configuration edit rather than a rewrite.

At Zukko↗ billing tracks tokens, the request history is in the dashboard, and the API matches the original — leaving is as quick as arriving. The current model list is at GET https://api.zukko.pro/v1/models; prices and context are at GET /v1/models/info or on the Models page in the dashboard.