AIsa vs a traditional API gateway
Traditional API gateways such as Kong or Apigee manage traffic to APIs you already own. AIsa supplies the APIs, meters them per call on a prepaid wallet and asks for user consent before an agent commits spend.
Platform comparisonUpdated
The short answer
A traditional API gateway is infrastructure you run in front of APIs you already have: it handles auth, rate limits, routing and analytics for traffic you control. AIsa is a marketplace and transaction layer: it gives an agent access to models and third-party data and SaaS APIs it has no accounts for, meters each call against a budget and holds paid actions for user approval. They answer different questions. Use a gateway to expose and protect your own services. Use AIsa to let an agent consume external capabilities safely.
Choose AIsa when
- The agent needs third-party models, data or SaaS actions it does not have credentials for.
- You want budgets enforced at the point of purchase, with approval above a threshold.
- You want one usage-based bill instead of many vendor contracts.
- You want capabilities discoverable by agents via Agent Card, MCP and llms.txt.
Choose Traditional API gateway when
- You are exposing your own microservices to internal or external consumers.
- You need policy enforcement, transformation and rate limiting on traffic you own.
- Cost is settled with your own upstream providers and does not need per-call metering.
AIsa vs Traditional API gateway at a glance
| Dimension | AIsa | Traditional API gateway |
|---|---|---|
| What sits behind it | Third-party models, data and SaaS APIs supplied by AIsa | Your own services and any upstreams you have contracts with |
| Credentials | One AIsa key for every catalog capability | You provision and rotate keys per upstream |
| Billing | Per-call metering on a prepaid wallet, one invoice | Traffic is free to route; upstream costs are settled separately |
| Budget controls | Spend limits per key and per task | Rate limits and quotas, not monetary budgets |
| Approval before paid execution | Yes, above a configurable threshold | No concept of a paid action |
| Prebuilt agent workflows | Agent Skills | None |
| Machine discovery | A2A Agent Card, MCP catalogue, OpenAPI 3.1, llms.txt | Developer portal and OpenAPI, if you publish them |
| Operations | Managed service | Self-hosted or managed control plane you operate |
Traffic management versus capability supply
A gateway does not give an application any new capability; it governs access to capabilities the organisation already has. That is valuable for exposing your own services, and nothing on AIsa replaces it for that job.
An agent has the opposite problem. It needs capabilities it does not own: a frontier model, a search index, company data, a social feed. AIsa supplies those through one catalog and one key, which is why it describes itself as a resource and transaction network rather than a gateway.
Rate limits are not budgets
Gateways limit requests per second or per month. They do not know that one call to a paid data API costs more than a thousand model tokens, and they cannot stop an agent from draining a budget within its rate limit. AIsa meters cost per call, enforces monetary limits per key and per task, and records usage so the spend is auditable.
Consent before the agent commits
The distinctive piece is the approval step. When an agent proposes a paid action above the configured threshold, AIsa waits for the user to consent before executing it. Selection, authorization, settlement, delivery and audit are separate stages, so a human stays in control of what money is spent while the agent stays autonomous on everything under the threshold.
Common questions
- Can AIsa sit behind my existing API gateway?
- Yes. AIsa's endpoints are ordinary HTTPS APIs with OpenAPI documentation, so a gateway can proxy them like any upstream. Budget enforcement and approval still happen on the AIsa side.
- Is AIsa OpenAI-compatible?
- Yes. Model inference on AIsa is exposed through OpenAI-compatible endpoints such as /v1/chat/completions and /v1/responses, plus /v1/messages for Anthropic-style requests, so existing SDKs work by changing the base URL and API key.
- What does AIsa offer beyond model routing?
- A catalog of ready-to-call APIs for search, research, financial and market data, company and people data, social media and SEO, plus task-oriented Agent Skills that package several of those calls behind one interface. All of it is billed to the same account and key as model usage.
- How does AIsa control agent spend?
- Usage is metered per call against a prepaid wallet with budget limits. Paid actions that exceed a configured threshold are not executed until the user or operator approves them, which keeps an autonomous agent from spending beyond what it was authorized to spend.
- Is AIsa an API management product?
- No. It does not manage traffic to your own services. It provides access to external models, data and tools, with metering and payment handled for the agent.
Try AIsa with your own agent.
One OpenAI-compatible key for models, data APIs and Agent Skills, with budget limits and approval before paid actions.