Behest vs legacy AI gateways
One control plane for every AI call, not just a gateway.
Legacy gateways route your AI calls and enforce per-key budgets. Behest attributes every call to a user, session, and project, produces chargeback reports, and routes on cost and policy, so finance, security, and engineering share one control plane.
The short version
What does Behest add over a legacy AI gateway?
A legacy AI gateway routes calls and can enforce per-key budgets, redact PII, and restrict models. Behest is the control plane for enterprise AI: it attributes every call to a user, session, and project, produces chargeback reports, routes on cost and policy, and includes the backend your apps need.
What you get beyond a gateway
See who spent what, then charge it back
Every AI call is attributed to a user, session, and project, and finance gets chargeback reports, not just per-key totals. Hard budgets block the call before the provider invoice arrives.
Govern every call in one place
Decide which teams can use which models and keep an audit trail of every call. On the Enterprise plan, personal information is removed before a prompt reaches a model and prompt attacks are blocked.
Optimize model choice on cost and policy
Cost-aware routing picks the model that fits the use case and your policy, and can lower model costs up to ~30%, depending on use case. Run it as SaaS or in your own cloud.
Side by side
Capabilities Behest ships today, next to what legacy gateways publicly document.
| Capability | Behest | Legacy gateways |
|---|---|---|
| See: spend attributed to each user, session, and project | Partial | |
| Control: hard budgets that block the call before the invoice | ||
| Control: chargeback reports for finance | Partial | |
| Govern: private data removed before the model sees it | Yes (Enterprise plan) | |
| Govern: prompt attacks blocked | Yes (Enterprise plan) | Partial |
| Govern: which teams can use which models | ||
| Govern: audit trail of every call | ||
| Optimize: cost-aware routing across providers | Partial | |
| Run: SaaS or your own cloud | ||
| Run: sign-in, memory, and usage tiers for your own apps | ? |
"Partial" means the capability exists in a narrower form (for example, attribution per key, workspace, or consumer rather than per user, or budget fallback rather than cost-aware routing). "?" means it is not documented in publicly available materials. Private-data removal and prompt-attack defense are Enterprise plan capabilities in Behest.
Frequently asked questions
- How does Behest compare to legacy AI gateways?
- Legacy gateways route and log AI calls, and the leading ones add per-key budgets, PII redaction, model catalogs, and audit logs. Behest is the control plane for enterprise AI: it attributes spend to each user, session, and project, produces chargeback reports for finance, and routes on cost and policy, with governance controls on every call.
- Is a legacy AI gateway an AI control plane?
- Not on its own. A gateway sits between your apps and the model providers and enforces limits per key, workspace, or consumer. A control plane starts with that gateway function and adds what finance and security need: attribution to each user and project, chargeback, model access policy by team, audit, and cost-aware routing across providers.
- Can I use Behest and a legacy gateway together?
- Yes. Behest includes multi-provider routing and usage analytics, so most teams replace a separate gateway. Teams that already run a gateway at scale can keep it as a routing layer behind Behest, with Behest handling attribution, budgets, chargeback, and model access policy.
- What does Behest do that legacy gateways do not?
- Attribute spend to each user, session, and project out of the box, produce chargeback reports for finance, and route on cost and policy across providers. Legacy gateways cover per-key budgets, PII redaction, model catalogs, and audit logs. Behest also includes sign-in, memory, and usage tiers for apps you build on it. The table above is the verified comparison.
Need more than a gateway?
See usage, control spend, govern access, and optimize model choice on every AI call, in our cloud or yours. See it on your own AI stack.
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