Treat gateways as hot‑swappable infrastructure, not permanent vendors.

Treat gateways as hot‑swappable infrastructure, not permanent vendors. OpenRouter joining forces with Stripe and Nvidia circling Hugging Face remind you that “API‑compatible” rarely equals operational portability. Separate three seams in production: routing (which model handles each request), billing and identity (who pays and who owns quotas), and evaluation/compliance (how you measure outputs and keep audit trails). If you expose those as config knobs, a takeover or price shock is likelier to be a config change you make than a full systems incident.