If you don't run your own LLM proxy, how do you know whats going on?

I'd love to do something like this, or use API keys, but I still don't understand how people justify the cost of using API keys vs. subscription.

I tested it once, I'm in on the 20x claude max ($200/month) and I either max my weekly limit every week or come really close. But it only took 2-3 days to hit $200 spend with api keys.

Yeah you should run an LLM proxy, but imagine a world where LiteLLM and all the other LLM shovels weren't buggy vibecoded messes. And with the velocity of updates I feel there has to be vulnerabilities there. Or am I just holding it wrong? Anyone got a good alternative?

One man’s fun is another man’s “idk what any of these words mean, I pay $20/mo for some company to abstract this complexity away”

For clarity, I do like blog posts like these.

Seeing some good stuff in the comments, but how are people doing this?

OpenRouter does all this for you. It's pretty nice. Although for apps I use another server to lock down the requests even more and prevent the client from seeing my API key.

Yup. Setting up liteLLMProxy on some servers as we speak and will start playing around.

I can't orchestrate agents in sandboxes without it.

1. It can issue virtual keys, so provider API keys never go near the sandbox

2. I can see everything

3. Guardrails

And much more

Looking forward to it.

Well that was one of the reasons why i build my own agent/harness - to have actual full observability of what it is doing and why it is doing what it is doing.

Don't really understand why other agents to give those insights but well found my solution.

Does anyone here use LiteLLM for this? How well does it do? Can I use it with my Claude subscription?

most interesting link i've seen on this site in a while