Pick infrastructure for a Claude-powered product in 2026 and two very different kinds of "API gateway" compete for your base URL. Requesty.ai is a multi-provider router. It spreads requests across 150+ models from Anthropic, OpenAI, Google, Mistral, Meta, DeepSeek, xAI and others, adds smart fallback and cost-aware routing, and folds everything into one bill. codexkey makes the opposite choice: a gateway for Claude only, with full support for Anthropic's features, EU/RU presence and local payment rails.
Both answers are legitimate. Which one fits depends on what you are building: a multi-vendor portfolio of LLM calls or a Claude-native product. Below you will find where each belongs, with code, a feel for the pricing, and the trade-offs that matter at scale.
What Requesty.ai is
Requesty calls itself the "smart router for LLMs". Under the hood it is an OpenAI-compatible proxy that:
- gives you one endpoint and one API key,
- sends each request to one of many providers by rules you set (cheapest, fastest, best quality, pinned to a region),
- switches to another provider on its own if the primary returns errors, hits a rate limit or times out,
- rolls usage and spend across all vendors into one dashboard and one invoice,
- uses the OpenAI Chat Completions schema as a common language and smooths over provider quirks.
The main argument for Requesty is redundancy and cost arbitrage. If Anthropic has a regional outage, traffic spills over to a comparable Sonnet-class model at another vendor. If a GPT-class model happens to be cheaper this week for your mix of workloads, the router can prefer it.
For teams with mixed workloads this is a real gain: classification, retrieval, code, chat, vision, and no single vendor best at all of them.
What codexkey is
codexkey is the focused alternative: a gateway for Claude only. What it offers:
- Anthropic-compatible and OpenAI-compatible endpoints.
- Pay-per-token pricing that matches Anthropic's direct rates (details in the breakdown Claude API pricing in 2026).
- Full feature parity with the upstream Messages API: prompt caching, tool use, computer use, extended thinking, vision, streaming, batches.
- EU/RU presence with local payments (card, crypto and SBP, the Russian Faster Payments System), so teams in regions where Anthropic's billing is awkward can still run Claude in production.
- No abstraction tax: when Anthropic ships a feature, it shows up in codexkey in the same shape, with the same fields, on the same day.
The trade is explicit: codexkey does not route to GPT-5 or Gemini for you. It is a Claude pipe, tuned to be invisible.
Pricing models compared
Requesty's price has two parts: the underlying provider cost (passed through, sometimes with a small markup) and the routing service itself. On some plans that is a flat fee on top of usage, on others a percentage. The exact numbers change, so check their current pricing page, but the structure is clear: beyond tokens, you pay for a routing layer.
codexkey has one cost line: tokens at Anthropic-matched rates. No platform fee, no seat fee, no monthly minimum. You top up a balance and spend it.
For a workload that is almost all Claude, the math is plain: you pay only for what the model produced, with no router overhead. If the workload does gain from multi-vendor fallback, the router fee can pay for itself through avoided downtime. That holds only if you need the fallback path in the first place.
When routing matters
Routing is truly valuable in three scenarios:
- Vendor redundancy for an SLA. If a 30-minute Anthropic incident would breach your customer SLA, automatic spillover to another vendor is worth real money.
- Cost-aware A/B routing across vendors. If your quality evals confirm that Sonnet, GPT-class and Gemini-class models are interchangeable for a given step, sending each request to the cheapest provider lowers the bill.
- Geographic pinning. Some routers pin requests to particular regions for data residency, which matters in regulated industries.
If none of these applies to you, and for many Claude-native products none does, the routing layer is an abstraction you pay for and never use.
Where Claude focus wins
For teams that have settled on Claude as their model family, a focused gateway has concrete advantages:
- No abstraction tax. Multi-provider routers flatten requests to a lowest-common-denominator schema, usually OpenAI Chat Completions. Anthropic-specific fields (
cache_controlblocks,thinkingparameters, computer-use tool definitions, citation blocks) get stripped, mangled, or show up late, behind the router's release cycle. - Prompt caching works correctly. Caching is the biggest cost lever on Claude in 2026. It needs byte-exact prefix matches on the input, so the gateway must not rewrite your messages. A Claude-focused proxy keeps the request shape, while routers often do not.
- Computer use and extended thinking come first. These are Anthropic-only capabilities. A router that has to support 150+ models cannot give them priority.
- New features land faster. When Anthropic ships a model or a parameter, a focused gateway exposes it right away. A router has to decide whether and how to surface it on top of its own abstraction.
Payment options
This is where the regional picture gets concrete.
Requesty is US-oriented. It takes standard US and EU corporate cards through Stripe and suits teams with a US billing entity. Crypto support is limited or absent, depending on the plan. SBP is not supported.
codexkey accepts:
- Cards: Visa, Mastercard, Mir (the Russian national card system) and cards from major EU issuers.
- Crypto: USDT (TRC-20, ERC-20), BTC, ETH and others through CryptoCloud and CryptoBot. Useful for teams without a corporate card or with cross-border payment trouble.
- SBP (Russian Faster Payments System): instant top-up from any Russian bank, credited to your codexkey balance within seconds.
- YooKassa (a Russian payment service): invoices for legal entities in rubles.
For teams in Russia, the CIS, the Middle East and parts of Asia, where US-issued cards are unreliable for AI infrastructure, this is often what settles the choice.
Code: swapping the base URL
Both gateways are OpenAI-compatible, so migration comes down to one line. The same call through codexkey:
from openai import OpenAI
client = OpenAI(
base_url="https://api.codexkey.online/v1",
api_key="sk-cx-...",
)
resp = client.chat.completions.create(
model="claude-sonnet-5",
messages=[
{"role": "system", "content": "You are a careful code reviewer."},
{"role": "user", "content": "Review this diff: ..."},
],
max_tokens=1024,
)
print(resp.choices[0].message.content)
If you need the Anthropic-native shape with prompt caching, computer use or extended thinking, point the Anthropic SDK at the same host:
from anthropic import Anthropic
client = Anthropic(
base_url="https://api.codexkey.online",
api_key="sk-cx-...",
)
resp = client.messages.create(
model="claude-sonnet-5",
max_tokens=1024,
system=[
{
"type": "text",
"text": "Long system prompt with tool docs ...",
"cache_control": {"type": "ephemeral"},
}
],
messages=[{"role": "user", "content": "Summarise the changes."}],
)
The cache_control block goes straight through to Anthropic. No router rewrites the request or strips fields.
When Requesty wins
Be honest with yourself. Requesty is the better choice if:
- You run A/B routing across Claude, GPT-class and Gemini-class models, and quality evals back the routing decisions.
- Spillover on a vendor outage is a hard SLA requirement, and an hour of downtime costs more than the router fee.
- Your workload is truly mixed, with embeddings at one vendor, vision at another and chat at a third, and you want one invoice.
- You are fine living behind the OpenAI Chat Completions abstraction and have no use for Anthropic-specific features.
When codexkey wins
codexkey is the better choice if:
- Claude is your model family and you want the upstream features intact rather than flattened beyond recognition.
- Prompt caching, computer use, extended thinking and Anthropic's batch API have to behave exactly as documented.
- You live in a region where US-card billing is unreliable and you need card, crypto or SBP top-ups.
- You want one transparent cost line (tokens at upstream rates) with no router fee and no platform minimum.
Bottom line
Requesty.ai is a good answer if you are building a multi-vendor LLM portfolio and the routing layer earns its keep. codexkey is the right answer if you are building a Claude-native product and want a transparent pipe with full feature parity and regional payment rails. Both plug in by changing one base URL line. Choose the one whose defaults match your roadmap, not the one with the longer model catalog.