A better model launches, or a provider raises prices. Someone works out what switching costs, the answer is a quarter of engineering time across a dozen services, and the conversation ends. That is not a model problem. It is a purchasing position you gave away by accident.
What it changes for the business
- You get to negotiate. A provider who knows you cannot leave prices accordingly. Being able to move in an afternoon changes the conversation.
- Model decisions stop being release decisions. Choosing a cheaper or better model becomes a change of configuration rather than work for every team that touches AI.
- A provider outage stops being your outage. Traffic moves to an alternative automatically instead of waiting for someone to ship a fix.
- Data questions get an answer. Where a model runs is something you set centrally, so "can we use this model for that data?" has a place to be decided.
How it works, briefly
Your applications keep the client library and the request shapes they already use, and point at Squidder instead of at a provider. Which model actually serves each request is decided by your policy, per application. More than twenty providers are supported behind that single point, including the major hosted ones and models you run yourself.
| How this is handled elsewhere | How Squidder does it |
|---|---|
| Model name hard-coded in each service | Chosen by policy, per application |
| Switching means a release per team | Switching is a configuration change |
| Provider keys spread across repositories | Held in one place, not in your code |
| Outage means an incident and a rollback | Automatic failover to an alternative |
| Locked to one vendor's ecosystem | One way of working across all of them |
Where it fits, and where it does not
Anything sitting between your request and a provider is a thing that can be wrong, and a parameter it does not recognize is a parameter that does not arrive. That is why an untranslated path exists for the cases where you need a provider's exact behavior, including a capability released last week. Use the common path for the common case and the exact one where fidelity matters.
Where to start
Take the least critical service you have that calls a model. Point it at the gateway and change nothing else. Then switch its model centrally and confirm the service never noticed. That is the whole proof.