Do you actually trust cheaper LLM API gateways for production use?

I've been curious about how people here feel about third-party LLM API gateways.

There are obviously services like OpenRouter, and now quite a few smaller providers such as VoyageAge offering access to OpenAI / Claude models at much lower prices than going directly through the official APIs.

The pricing can be pretty attractive, especially if you're burning through a lot of tokens.

But once it comes to actual production use, I'm not sure price is the biggest concern anymore.

For those of you who have used these kinds of APIs:

• Would you actually run production traffic through one?
• How important is uptime vs price?
• Do you care about RPM/concurrency limits?
• How much extra latency is acceptable?
• Are tool calls / streaming usually reliable?
• What would make you choose a smaller gateway over OpenRouter or the official APIs?

Personally, if the price difference is big enough and the API is fully OpenAI-compatible, I think it becomes pretty tempting.

But reliability is probably the part I'd worry about most.

Curious where everyone draws the line between cheap enough to try and reliable enough for production.