Maxim AI

Bifrost is an AI gateway made by Maxim AI. It sits between your application and AI model providers, giving teams one interface for routing requests to large language models, MCP tools and agents. The core gateway is open source, and an Enterprise edition adds features for larger organisations, with a 14-day free trial.

What a gateway does

Instead of calling each provider directly, your application sends requests to Bifrost, which forwards them to the chosen model. The site describes access to more than 1,000 models from 8+ providers through a unified interface, plus support for custom deployed models. Bifrost is presented as a drop-in replacement for existing SDKs: you change the base URL in code that uses OpenAI, Anthropic, the Vercel AI SDK, LangChain and others. A quick start runs with a single npx command.

Features

Listed features include budgeting with spending limits per team, project or model, automatic failover between providers, and a built-in MCP gateway that centralises tool connections, authentication and governance. Organisations can manage budgets per virtual key, keep audit logs and control access through SSO. Guardrails are described as real-time protection that blocks unsafe outputs and helps enforce compliance, and observability features let teams monitor traffic in production.

Performance claims

Maxim publishes benchmark figures comparing Bifrost with LiteLLM, including about 20 microseconds of added latency, 5,000 requests per second throughput and lower memory use. These are the company's own tests on its chosen hardware, so treat them as a starting point and measure performance with your own traffic.

Who it suits

Bifrost suits engineering teams running AI features in production that use several model providers, need cost controls across teams, or want a single place to apply security policies. Smaller projects calling a single model may not need a gateway at all.

Things to consider

Check the pricing page to see which features are in the open-source version and which need Enterprise, especially governance, SSO and some guardrails. Decide whether you will self-host the gateway or use a managed option, since that affects who handles uptime and data. Because every request passes through it, test failover and latency under realistic load before switching production traffic, and keep a plan for rolling back. Review logging settings so that prompts and responses containing personal or sensitive data are stored only where your policies allow, and confirm how long logs are kept.