Providers and Combos

Providers & Combos 🧩

Mid-task, the provider that answered all week hits its limit. The tool waits a beat — and usually nothing worse happens: aigate moves on to the next member without you resending. That move rests on three words: provider, combo, endpoint. If you read one page besides Quick Start, read this one.

The chain 🔗

A provider is one AI service — a key plus an address to reach it. Kinds and setup live in Configuration & Keys. The address may even point at the device aigate runs on, which is how a model with no internet at all still answers.

One provider can hold several accounts, in the order you set. Walk them either way: run the first until it runs dry, then move on — or share the turns with a cap per account before the next steps up.

A combo is a list of provider-and-model choices lined up as one option. None arrive ready-made, and you name them yourself. Each member gets a place in the row and a share of traffic, and the combo runs on one strategy — next section.

An endpoint is the tidy local address a combo exposes to your tools — the line you paste into a coding tool. One combo, one address; which member answers is aigate's business, not yours.

The strategy, in words 🎲

Five choices sit on the combo screen:

fallback — the standard one. A queue by row order: ask the first; if it errors, move on without a resend. A quota or access complaint first tries the same provider's next account. If the whole queue fails, the last error surfaces as written.

load_balance — a dice roll weighted per request: work spreads over several accounts instead of grinding one down.

latency_cost — reads each share as a cost guess and takes the cheapest, exactly once: if the cheap one is down, the request fails rather than quietly moving elsewhere. Cheap-and-steady over always-answers, on purpose.

three_tier — the same queue, ordered by service level first: subscription, then cheap, then free; row order decides inside each level.

round_robin — strict turns, shares ignored: one member per request, walking the list and wrapping around. A just-failed member is stepped past, so the next request starts elsewhere.

Queue-style strategies also read quotas: a member whose provider is at zero remaining moves to the back, never out.

Keys and the way out 🔌

Each endpoint can require its own access key, so lending a laptop doesn't hand your combo to everyone. Each may also leave through a proxy pool — hosts and ports you exit through, taken in turn, each one's health and delay probed and recorded. Wiring an address into your own code: OpenAI API.

The one-sentence version ✍️

Gather three providers into one combo — call it my-combo, point every tool at its single address, let aigate take the turns. Reshuffle the list in one place, and every connected tool follows.

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