I gotta say, why I Stopped Recommending "Just Go Direct" for AI APIs
I used to tell every founder I advised the same thing: "Skip the middleman, hit OpenAI or DeepSeek directly." Then I watched a team burn three weeks trying to get a Chinese phone number to sign up for a model they wanted to test. That's when I changed my tune.
Here's the thing nobody wants to say out loud: the AI API landscape has become a mess of walled gardens, and choosing between "enterprise" and "startup" paths is way more nuanced than the LinkedIn influencers want you to believe. Most advice treats these as totally separate worlds. They're not. And the idea that you should always go direct to the source? That advice is usually wrong, and I'll explain why.
I'm going to walk you through what I've actually learned from helping teams ship AI products over the past couple years — from scrappy MVPs to companies processing millions in monthly API spend. Spoiler: they all ended up using the same routing layer, just configured differently.
The Real Differences (And Why Most Guides Miss Them)
