FAQ
Questions we get asked.
Short answers to the questions that come up most in sales conversations. If your question is not here, email [email protected] or start on the docs.
Do you support MCP (Model Context Protocol)?
Yes — passthrough today, universal shim next. Add an `mcp_servers` array to any /v1/chat/completions request and Leanroute forwards it to Anthropic's Messages API; Claude connects to your MCP server(s) server-side, calls tools as needed, and returns the final answer in OpenAI shape. No separate MCP client, no SDK swap. v1 requires an Anthropic-family model because Anthropic's Messages API is currently the only chat completion API that natively consumes mcp_servers; setting mcp_servers on a non-Anthropic model returns 400 with `mcp_unsupported_provider` rather than silently dropping the field. Response header `x-gateway-mcp-passthrough: N` confirms how many servers were forwarded (URLs and auth tokens never leak into headers). Universal cross-provider MCP (a gateway-hosted shim that lets OpenAI, Google, xAI etc. consume MCP too) is the /v2 story. Full reference at /docs/mcp.
How is Leanroute different from OpenRouter, LiteLLM, Portkey, Helicone, Bifrost, or Kong AI Gateway?
One line: we're the only LLM gateway that also carries MCP tool servers through the same OpenAI-compatible endpoint. Add `mcp_servers` to any chat completion request; Leanroute forwards it to Anthropic and Claude connects to your MCP server(s) server-side. None of the alternatives accept MCP servers in any form. Beyond that: OpenRouter is 400+ models, US-hosted, 5% per-request markup on every call including BYOK. LiteLLM is open-source self-host. Portkey is the closest functional peer: hosted gateway with guardrails and SOC 2, US-focused, $49/mo + per-request fees. Helicone is observability-first and pairs cleanly with us. Bifrost is a newer Go-based self-host. Kong AI Gateway is AI plugins on Kong's general-purpose gateway. We're Singapore-hosted with first-class APAC provider depth (DeepSeek, Qwen, GLM, Doubao, Kimi, Sarvam, Krutrim alongside the Western frontier), $15/$25 flat BYOK subscription that no per-request platform can match, and universal cross-provider MCP support planned for /v2. Detailed side-by-side at /compare and the six per-competitor pages underneath.
Can I send images, not just text?
Yes. Vision input is live across OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, DeepSeek-VL2, and the full APAC vision pool: Qwen2.5-VL / Qwen-VL-Max (Alibaba Bailian), GLM-4V (Zhipu), Doubao Vision Pro (ByteDance), and Kimi vision preview (Moonshot). Send standard OpenAI `image_url` content parts (URL or base64 data URI) inside your message and we translate per upstream: Anthropic's base64 `image` blocks (or url source for HTTPS), Gemini's `inlineData` (we fetch + base64 HTTPS URLs server-side because Gemini doesn't accept image URLs), and passthrough for every OpenAI-compatible provider. Routing is vision-safe: we never swap a vision-bearing request to a text-only model, even with cheaper-model swaps on org-wide, so an image never gets silently dropped. With BYOK keys on Qwen or GLM, you can route a GPT-4o vision request to Qwen-VL or GLM-4V at a fraction of the cost, same content-parts wire on your side. (Grok is text-only at the moment so vision requests skip it automatically.) What we don't do yet: image generation (DALL-E, GPT-Image-1, Stable Diffusion), audio (Whisper / TTS / Realtime), video. Those stay roadmapped.
If I pick Claude Sonnet, will you swap it out?
Only if you opt in. Default behavior is to send to the exact model you asked for. With X-Gateway-Routing: explicit on the request, we'll respect it even when org-level cheaper-model swaps are on. The swaps we do are same-tier-only: Sonnet → DeepSeek-V3 because they're within a few points on MMLU / GPQA / HumanEval, never Sonnet → gpt-4o-mini. The mapping is public, we re-evaluate on every major model release, and you can disable swaps entirely at the org level or per-request. We never reroute when tools are set on the request.
How does pricing work?
Two options. BYOK subscription: $15/mo Starter (1M requests/mo, 30 RPM) or $25/mo Pro (5M requests/mo + $3 per extra 1M, 150 RPM). You bring your own provider keys; we route, cache, guardrail, observe, and log. No per-request fee to the gateway — the flat monthly covers everything. 14-day trial, card required upfront, cancel anytime. Enterprise ($) is contact-sales for volume commits, dedicated regions, MSA. Alternatively pay-as-you-go credits: top up $50+ USD by credit card, we apply a 5% platform fee at deposit ($50 → $47.50 credit), and every inference call debits the exact upstream cost — zero per-request markup on inference. This matches OpenRouter's 5% but applied once at deposit rather than compounded on every call, so a $1000 pass-through with them costs the same $1050 either way. Cache hits are $0 across every plan. Cost is surfaced on every invoice.
Do you store my prompts?
Not in Postgres — our request log stores metadata only (model, tokens, cost, latency), never prompt content. Prompts DO live briefly in the Redis prompt cache: the cache key is a hash of your request, the value is the response body, TTL is 24 hours. This is on by default so identical repeat requests return at $0 without a provider round-trip. If semantic caching is enabled, the embedding vector of your prompt (numeric, not plaintext) is also stored to serve semantically-similar queries. Caches are scoped per organization — your data can never satisfy another org. Flip on no-persistence mode in the dashboard to disable both caches; nothing about your prompts then touches our infrastructure beyond the duration of the HTTP request. Wipe-cache-now button included.
Do you have guardrails?
Yes, a minimal layer: per-org block + redact regex patterns and an optional OpenAI moderation pre-check, configured in /dashboard/settings. Block patterns reject the request with 400 prompt_blocked; redact patterns replace matches with [REDACTED] before dispatch; moderation flags trip the same error code with a categories list. For real PII detection (Microsoft Presidio), prompt-injection defense (Lakera Guard), or jailbreak detection (Rebuff) we document the specialist tools in /docs/integrations rather than shipping our own. They're meaningfully better at those problems and we don't compete on them. Full details + integration guides at /guardrails.
Where is data hosted?
Singapore by default. Other regions available on request. Database + cache encrypted at rest. BYOK provider keys encrypted client-side with AES-256-GCM before they reach our database; we couldn't read them in plaintext even from a database dump.
Why would I use this instead of going direct to DeepSeek?
If you're 100% sure you'll stay on DeepSeek forever and you don't need observability or per-environment key management, you wouldn't. But most people want failover to a Western provider when DeepSeek is rate-limited, a unified API across providers as their model mix evolves, cost analytics that show 'what did this customer cost me this week,' and the ability to swap providers without code changes. On BYOK Starter/Pro that's a flat $15-$25/mo — cheaper than one hour of your time debugging a provider outage.
How does this work with Continue, Cursor, OpenWebUI, etc.?
They all accept a custom OpenAI-compatible base URL. Set it to api.leanroute.dev/v1, paste your gateway key, done. Integration guides for each are at /docs/integrations.
When can I actually use it?
Now. Sign up and you'll get a gateway key immediately. We're early and shipping fast. For production workloads we recommend a gradual rollout (start with a low-stakes route, expand as you build confidence) and keeping multi-account failover on (it retries on same-tier alternatives when the primary provider returns 5xx errors). The founder's direct line is in the dashboard footer if anything looks off.