7 AI Gateways That Actually Work in Production (2026 Guide)

Let me start with an admission. I resisted using an AI gateway for longer than I should have. My reasoning was the kind engineers convince themselves is pragmatic. "I'll just call the APIs directly, it's faster to ship, I'll add abstraction later." And for a while, it worked. Until the night an Anthropic outage knocked my app offline for two hours. Until the morning a recursive agent loop racked up thousands of dollars in charges before anyone woke up. Until the security audit flagged raw API ke