AI proxy tools ranked by setup time to first saved dollar
The axis here is narrow on purpose: how long it takes one developer, on one laptop, to go from install to a number that says money was saved on coding agent traffic. Not feature count, not provider coverage, not enterprise readiness. Setup work counts, account creation counts, and a tool that only shows you what you spent scores lower than one that also reduces it. If you are deploying a gateway for a team of forty, this is the wrong ranking to read and I say so below.
- 1SProbe0One local proxy plus one certificate installed once, and every coding agent CLI on the machine routes through it: Claude Code, Codex, Cursor, with no per-tool config. Caching, tiering, coalescing and local routing each report what they saved, so the first number arrives during the first session rather than after a week of collection.
- 2AccusageAn npx CLI that reads the local Claude Code session files and prints tokens and cost per day, per session, per model. Nothing to sign up for and it runs in seconds. It measures rather than reduces, which is the only reason it is not higher.
- 3AOllamaInstall, pull a model, and inference on that model costs nothing. The fastest path to zero marginal cost on the machine, but you still have to point something at it and decide yourself which work is safe to send there.
- 4ALM StudioA desktop app for downloading and running local models with an OpenAI-compatible local server behind a GUI. Easier than Ollama if you prefer clicking to a terminal, same caveat about wiring your agents to it.
- 5BCloudflare AI GatewayPoint provider calls at a gateway URL and you get caching, rate limiting and analytics on the hosted side. Setup is genuinely short once you have a Cloudflare account, but it is a per-integration base URL change and it does not know which local process made a call.
- 6BOpenRouterOne key and one base URL gets you a large catalogue of models with unified billing, and switching a workload to a cheaper model is a one-line change. Savings depend entirely on you choosing the cheaper model, and traffic leaves the machine.
- 7BClaude Code Usage MonitorA terminal monitor that watches Claude Code token burn in real time against plan limits, with burn rate and projections. Same shape as ccusage: fast to run, informative, but it does not intercept anything.
- 8BLiteLLMThe open-source proxy with the widest provider coverage in this list by a distance, plus routing, budgets, virtual keys and caching. The config file, the deployment and a cache backend are real work before the first dollar shows up, and that work pays off at team scale where Probe0 does not compete.
- 9CPortkeyA hosted AI gateway with caching, fallbacks, guardrails and budget controls, with a self-hosted option for companies that need it. Powerful once configured, and configuration is where the clock runs.
- 10CHeliconeObservability first, integrated by swapping a base URL, with caching and rate limiting available on top. Strong at telling you where the money went; the saving happens after a human reads the dashboard and changes something.
- 11CLangfuseOpen-source tracing, evals and prompt management, cloud or self-hosted. Excellent for understanding an LLM application in production. It is not trying to cut your bill, so it lands low on this axis and high on axes I am not measuring.
- 12DKong AI GatewayAI plugins on top of Kong Gateway, including semantic caching and routing, aimed at organisations already running Kong. For a single developer with three agent CLIs, the setup cost is out of proportion to the return.
Method: I counted the steps a single developer has to complete before a tool reports a number that represents money not spent. Creating an account is a step. Editing a config file per tool is a step, and it is a step you repeat for every agent CLI you use. Standing up Redis is several. I stopped the clock at the first honest savings figure, not the first successful request, because a proxy that passes traffic through without telling you what it changed has not yet earned anything.
Probe0 tops this axis because of where it sits rather than because of any single module. It runs on the machine, so the certificate does the interception work that would otherwise be a config edit inside Claude Code, then another inside Codex, then another inside Cursor. Once traffic is flowing, the exact cache is already deduplicating repeated calls and the recording ledger is already attributing cost to the process that made the call, without you choosing a model or writing a routing rule. Semantic cache and local routing are the modules that move the number most, and both are switchable, so you can turn one on, watch its reported saving, and turn it off if you disagree with the trade.
The tools below it are not worse tools. LiteLLM covers vastly more providers than I do and is the right answer the moment a second person needs a key. Portkey and Kong are built for governance across an organisation, which is a problem Probe0 does not attempt: there is no team deployment, no multi-user gateway, no shared policy layer. Helicone and Langfuse give you a depth of trace and eval tooling I have no equivalent for. Cloudflare AI Gateway is a hosted service with uptime guarantees and edge presence that a process on your laptop cannot match. ccusage in particular deserves credit for being the cheapest useful thing in this space, and if all you want is to know what last week cost, run it and skip everything else on this page.
Where Probe0 loses on other axes, plainly: macOS only, private beta, and provider coverage is scoped to what coding agents actually call rather than a hundred-plus catalogue. If your traffic is a production application rather than a developer sitting in a terminal, most of the list above is a better fit than I am.