I was showing off my new side project at a virtual meetup when it happened. The demo froze. I refreshed—nothing. The API calls to my single AI provider were all returning 503s. I had built an app that relied entirely on one service, and it was down. My carefully polished feature turned into a blank loading spinner. That night, I decided I'd never let that happen again.
The Problem with Single-Provider Dependency
We all love the convenience of a single AI API. You pick one, integrate it, and move on. But here's the thing: outages aren't rare. Rate limits creep up on you during a demo. Costs can spike without warning. And if that one provider changes their pricing or deprecates a model endpoint, you're stuck rewriting code.
I started with OpenAI. It worked great for months. Until it didn't. First a rate limit during my demo, then a small pricing hike that doubled my monthly bill. I tried switching to another provider manually, but that meant changing every API call across my codebase. Not scalable.
What I Tried That Didn't Work
