Every team building with AI eventually hits the same wall: the provider they depend on goes down, raises prices, or changes its models — and suddenly a core part of their product stops working.
ElseLane is the routing layer we built to make that problem disappear.
Why we built it
We integrate AI into client products regularly. And we kept running into the same pattern: teams pick one provider, build tightly against it, and then scramble when something changes. Rate limits, pricing shifts, model deprecations, outages — the AI provider landscape moves fast and breaks things.
The logical fix is multi-provider routing with automatic failover. But wiring that up from scratch on every project was its own engineering burden. So we built it once, properly, and packaged it as an API.
What it does
- Single endpoint, any provider — one OpenAI-compatible
/chat/completionscall withmodel: "auto", or a simplerPOST /api/v1/answer. Switch providers without changing a line of code. - Smart routing — ElseLane classifies the prompt and picks the right provider for the job. Not every request needs the most expensive model.
- Automatic failover — if the primary provider fails, ElseLane retries down the list silently. Transparent attempt headers tell you what happened if you need to know.
- Credits-first pricing — prepaid credit packs ($10 / $25 / $50) with no subscriptions, no minimums, and no surprises. Prompts and answers are never stored.
- JSON mode and streaming — full support for structured output and real-time streaming responses.
The engineering challenge
Routing AI prompts well is harder than it sounds. Provider APIs differ in subtle ways — parameter naming, token limits, error codes, streaming formats. Building a reliable abstraction layer that normalises all of that without adding latency took careful design.
The credits model was a deliberate product decision too. Most AI API products push monthly subscriptions. We wanted something a solo developer could try for $10 without a billing commitment — and something a high-volume team could scale on the same pricing model without switching plans.
Why it matters for client work
Every AI feature we now build for clients gets ElseLane's routing and failover by default. It's the same infrastructure we eat our own cooking with — and it's available to any developer who wants it.