LiteLLM: One API for Every AI Model Your Business Uses

Every AI provider speaks its own dialect. OpenAI has one request format, Anthropic another, Google a third, and the local models you run yourself a fourth. Wiring an application to all of them means writing and maintaining a different integration for each — and rewriting everything the day a better or cheaper model shows up.

LiteLLM removes that work. It is an open-source library that gives you a single, unified interface to call more than 100 LLMs — OpenAI, Anthropic, Vertex AI, Bedrock, Ollama, Azure, and more — all using the OpenAI format your developers already know.

What LiteLLM actually is

It ships in two forms, and both matter for a business:

• The SDK. A few lines of Python — completion(model="openai/gpt-5.6-terra", messages=[...]) — and you are talking to any provider. The model string is just provider/model, so switching providers is a one-word change, not a rewrite.
• The Gateway (Proxy). A self-hosted service that exposes one OpenAI-compatible endpoint in front of all your providers, with virtual keys, cost tracking, and an admin UI. Your apps point at the gateway; the gateway decides which provider answers.

Why a business should care

• No provider lock-in. If one model gets expensive, slower, or deprecated, you change a string — not your software. The application keeps working.
• Automatic fallback. LiteLLM's Router retries and falls back across multiple deployments. If your primary provider has an outage or hits a rate limit, the request quietly goes to the next one. Your customers never see the error.
• One bill, visible costs. The gateway tracks spend per key and per model, so you finally know what your AI features actually cost — instead of guessing across five provider dashboards.
• Virtual keys and access control. Issue a separate key to each app or team member, revoke it in one click, and keep an audit trail of who used what.
• Your data path stays yours. Self-hosted means the routing layer runs on your servers. Your prompts and keys are not handed to yet another third party.

Where it fits in a small business stack

Any business running more than one AI feature — a support assistant, an SMS auto-reply bot, a document summarizer, a scheduling agent — eventually faces the same problem: five integrations, five sets of credentials, five failure modes. A gateway collapses that into one endpoint and one dashboard. It is the difference between managing a tangle of wires and having a switchboard.

Point your apps at one endpoint. Let the gateway pick the model, handle the failures, and count the cost.

Getting started

The SDK installs in one command (uv add litellm); the full gateway runs as a container and needs no Python setup at all. Either way, the first call looks exactly like an OpenAI call — which is the entire point.

How Uphill Tech helps

We deploy and manage a self-hosted LiteLLM gateway for your applications — provider keys, fallback rules, cost limits, and monitoring handled, so your AI keeps running even when a provider doesn't. We can connect it to the systems you already use, exactly like the automation we run for our own clients. The first conversation is free.