OpenRouter, LiteLLM and similar gateways give your code one API for many models. Prompt Tornado solves a different problem: turning one request into a multi-step workflow and running it under a spend cap and a policy. The two fit together: Prompt Tornado's text, research and image calls go through LiteLLM.
A gateway sits between your application and the model providers. It gives you one API and one set of credentials for many models, a choice of model (and often a fallback) for each call, and usage tracking, often with per-key limits. Your code still decides what to call, in what order, and what to do with each answer.
| AI gateway | Prompt Tornado | |
|---|---|---|
| Unit of work | One model call | One workflow: a plan of steps |
| Who decides the steps | Your code | Generated from the prompt; you can review and edit it |
| Model choice | Per call, by your code or gateway rules | Per step, from ranked routes, with fallback |
| Spend control | Usage tracking; often per-key limits | A monthly cap checked before each run, with the estimated cost reserved |
| Governance | Depends on your setup | Allowed models, providers and data regions, applied at every step |
| Record | Request logs | A per-run record of each step, its model and cost, exportable as evidence |
| Where it runs | Your infrastructure or the gateway's | Hosted app and API |
You're building your own application and want raw model access behind one API, your logic is a single call or a flow you'd rather write yourself, or you need to self-host the whole layer.
The work is several steps across different models, you want the spend cap checked before a workflow runs, or you need to restrict which providers and regions your data goes to, and prove what ran.
Prompt Tornado's text, research and image calls go through LiteLLM; voice and video providers are called through their own APIs. On top of that, Prompt Tornado adds planning, per-step routing with fallback, spend reservation, governance checks and the run record.
Plan, route, cap and record multi-step AI workflows.