If you want a hard daily spend cap and a per-request cost ledger on one machine with no database server to run, RelayPlane is the smallest install of the three ( @relayplane/proxy on npm, free, MIT). If you want 100+ providers behind one gateway for a team, LiteLLM is the better tool. If you want a hosted API you don't run yourself, OpenRouter is the better tool. All three are real, none of them is a straight replacement for the other two, and this piece is an honest breakdown of where ...