"We wrapped LiteLLM with 100k lines of code": a YC company open-sourced its gateway in Rust, 42 days, 570 stars
What it is A single-file program written in Rust. Using one address, you can call OpenAI, Anthropic, Gemini and a dozen-plus other models with whichever vendor's SDK you like. Behind it is a YC company that sells a hosted platform.
Why it took off It tells a "why we rewrote it" story that anyone who has used LiteLLM will relate to. It launched the day after LiteLLM got poisoned. YC's Launch HN, same-day press coverage, a dev.to promoter and Rust-community accounts then passed it along, pushing the stars up step by step.
CHow you could follow this Don't build another general-purpose LLM gateway. Copy the launch method instead: prepare a "why we rewrote it" story you can tell in one sentence, put a named comparison table and a one-line install in the README, and fill a small gap that large gateway projects haven't covered well (for example, cross-vendor cost accounting).
- Data (updated daily) · Repo created 2026-09-25 · 598 stars · 7 days +169
GitHub · stars Data 2026-10-22 → 2026-11-08 (18 days, 18 observations). Points before 10-28 come from deeply / archive backfill, not every day has one
Respan Gateway is an open-source LLM gateway written in Rust: one program, with OpenAI, Anthropic, Gemini and a dozen-plus other models reachable from the same address, usable with any vendor's SDK. It's not a side project by an independent developer. It's built by Respan, a YC W24 company (formerly Keywords AI, which raised a $5M seed round in March 2026). The open-source gateway is the free part, and the money is in its hosted platform. The repo was created in Sep 25, and by Nov 6 it had 570 stars and 86 forks (GitHub, 11-06). That's a small number for this category, but for anyone trying to get stars for their own open-source project, it's worth looking at how it got these 570 stars.
A story about "it breaks when you upgrade"
On Oct 20, 2026, Respan's Andy posted a Launch HN on Hacker News. The opening didn't talk about tech. It told a story: "We've been building our gateway on LiteLLM since 2024, and we now serve thousands of organizations. Each org needs different keys, routing and limits, so we kept wrapping LiteLLM from the outside. Eventually the outer layer grew past 100k lines." "This January, a routine LiteLLM upgrade brought intermittent connection errors, and we had to roll it back. We still haven't figured out the cause. Since then we haven't dared to upgrade directly. We manually port upstream fixes one by one."
LiteLLM is the de facto standard in this space (62.8k stars), and anyone who has used it will relate to that story. The same day, The New Stack published an article whose headline nearly matched that passage: "Respan spent two years building on LiteLLM, then one upgrade sent it back to square one." AI Weekly, daily.dev and a string of aggregator sites then passed the story around again.
The next day, the morning of Oct 21, LiteLLM's release pipeline was compromised, and v1.107.0 was live on PyPI and Docker for about two hours with credential-stealing malware in the package (LiteLLM's official incident page). This was LiteLLM's second such incident this year; it had already been poisoned once in March. Microsoft's security blog also published an analysis on Oct 23. A Python proxy that holds all of your model API keys suddenly became something everyone was worried about. Respan had just explained the day before that "LiteLLM isn't reliable, so we rewrote it in Rust," and noted that its core depends on only 5 packages. I found no sign that Respan officially commented on this incident, but the timing did the promotion for it.
What it actually is
A single-file Rust program. pip install respan-gateway installs it in one line. Set the key for any provider and that provider works, no config file needed. Some selling points:
- Translates between four protocols: OpenAI Chat, OpenAI Responses, Anthropic Messages, Gemini. Clients can use whichever they like. The README example is "call GPT with Anthropic's SDK."
- Cross-vendor realtime voice: an app written against OpenAI Realtime can reach Gemini Live through it (the Launch post itself says not every feature maps across).
- MCP tools on the gateway: plain chat requests can use tools, and the app doesn't have to implement MCP itself.
- Everything is a plugin: following Nginx's approach, the core is tiny, and providers, protocols, retries and fallbacks are all plugins. Adding a provider takes one short file. The Mistral one is just 22 lines.
The README has a named comparison table: Respan adds 0.07ms latency, handles 56,734 requests per second, and uses 31MB of memory. LiteLLM (single worker) is 4.34ms, 268 requests, 418MB. These numbers are its own measurements, and the page doesn't say how they were taken (theterminal.space 10-23 specifically pointed this out). The Launch post also says the project is still pre-alpha.
Most HN comments focus on the plugin design. Plugins are Rust crates compiled into the binary, not loaded at runtime. Some say this means every new plugin has to be compiled yourself, and there isn't even a ready-made Docker image at release. Others say compiling third-party crates into a single process that holds all the keys is a supply-chain risk in itself. Someone asked directly whether the code was AI-written. Andy replied: "Yes, we use Claude to generate code, but we read every line." In the commit history, one person has 436 commits and the second place has 10 (GitHub contributors).
Where the stars came from
| Date | What happened | star |
|---|---|---|
| 09-25 | Repo created | 0 |
| 10-20 | v0.1.0 on crates.io; Launch HN 53 points, 24 comments; covered by The New Stack; company and employees posted on LinkedIn | – |
| 10-21 | LiteLLM v1.107.0 poisoned | – |
| 10-21~26 | Six or seven accounts on dev.to posted nearly identical "I tried Respan Gateway" posts | 10-22:113 |
| 10-23 | Microsoft publishes an incident analysis of LiteLLM | 134 |
| 10-25 | v0.3.0 | 216 |
| 10-26 | Rust Bytes, a Rust-community account, promoted it on X | 292 (+76, the best single day) |
| 10-27~11-06 | Daily +15~40 | 570 |
(stars from GitHub daily data)
The curve has no real breakout. The best day was only +76. It's several small pushes stacked together, and a few of them were clearly arranged:
- YC's Launch HN. Only YC companies get this slot. 53 points isn't high, and some commenters asked "why does the whole thread look like bots?" Several comments were neatly formatted long essays about "plugin boundaries matter more than plugin count." Whether anyone was steering the discussion can't be verified.
- Promo accounts on dev.to. From October 21 to 26, Dev Stack Hub, Elsie Rainee, Sidra Jefferi and six or seven other accounts posted nearly the same story. Looking through these accounts' other posts from the same period, they were also publishing things like "scraper proxies" and "11 vibe coding tools," several with 0 likes each. That pattern looks like an agency posting for several clients.
- Press coverage the same day. The New Stack ran a piece that day covering the story from the Launch post.
+176 over the last 7 days, versus +260 over the 7 days before that. It's already slowing. Few people are actually using it: PyPI had 423 downloads last week, and crates.io has 40 in total (pypistats, crates.io, 11-06).
How crowded is it? This is one of the most crowded tracks in open source
| Project | Form | Scale (11-06) | Compared with Respan |
|---|---|---|---|
| LiteLLM | Python,2023 | 62.8k star | De facto standard. 10-26 announced the core path moves to Rust, to be finished by December |
| OmniRoute | 2026-02 | 84.8k star | Aggregates free quotas for coding agents. Users are individuals |
| new-api / one-api | Go,2023 | 51k / 37k star | Distribution and resale panel for the Chinese-speaking market |
| Portkey gateway | TypeScript + hosted | 13.3k star | Same "open-source gateway + hosted observability" model. The most direct rival |
| TensorZero | Rust,2024 | 11.7k star | Also Rust, but focused on model optimization and experimentation |
| Bifrost | Go + hosted | 9.4k star | Also sells performance. It's the target of the README comparison table |
| agentgateway | Rust, Linux Foundation | 6k star | Neutral project, native MCP/A2A |
| Helicone ai-gateway | Rust,2025-04 | 642 star | Nearly the same positioning: from an observability company, Rust, and only 642 in over a year |
| antirion | 2026-10-17 | 538 star | Appeared the same week with the same pitch: "fastest, single file, built-in console" |
(Stars from GitHub, 11-06)
The Helicone row is the most telling. It's also Rust, also from an observability company, and it has only gathered 642 stars in a year and a half. "A gateway written in Rust" alone doesn't earn stars. What Respan added is a story anyone can repeat, an incident that happened to hit at the right time, and a full set of YC launch moves.
Could you follow it?
The specific things you can copy:
- A one-sentence reason for the rewrite. "Wrapped 100k lines, falls over on one upgrade." Media can use that as a headline directly. It names the industry leader, and anyone who has used the leader will nod along.
- Write the README like a product page. Include a named comparison table, a zero-config one-line install, and a surprising example like "call provider B's model with provider A's SDK."
- Push on several channels the same day. Don't count on one post to take off.
- Write the narrative in advance and wait for the moment. When the leader has an incident, your story should already be out there.
What you can't copy is more: YC's Launch HN slot, press you can reach the same day, production experience from thousands of organizations, and a company's headcount. In this track, there are already five or six projects with tens of thousands of stars, and LiteLLM has announced its own Rust rewrite, so the "Python is slow and unsafe" card will soon be harder to play.
If it were you
Verdict: learn the launch playbook, but don't build another LLM gateway. These 570 stars came from a YC company's launch moves plus a rival's incident at the right time. If one person builds the same thing, the likely curve is Helicone ai-gateway's.
Who it suits: someone who already has an open-source project and can tell a real story like "an established tool burned us, so we rewrote it"; someone who has one or two language-community accounts, press contacts, or a YC-style channel to help push it.
Who it doesn't suit: anyone starting from scratch on a general-purpose LLM gateway hoping for stars (LiteLLM, Portkey, Bifrost and agentgateway are all here, and antirion appeared the same week); anyone with no channels who plans to "build it and wait for people to find it."
How to do it: if you build, build a companion to gateways or a small piece the big projects handle badly, not a whole gateway. Two questions in the HN thread went unanswered: first, token usage and cost don't line up across vendors (Groq puts usage in its own field, Mistral doesn't report usage when streaming); second, people want a build page where you tick plugins on demand and get a custom build. A small tool that solves one of these, and sits in front of or behind any gateway, can use Respan's README format: a named comparison, a one-line install, and one counterintuitive example.
How to get users: in the launch post, lead with the time you got burned, then talk about your thing. Post on HN yourself, and at the same time on r/LLMDevs, r/rust and the relevant language-community accounts. The next time LiteLLM or another large gateway has an incident, explain your tool under the incident thread. Timing matters more than copy.
Deadline: LiteLLM says it will move the core path to Rust before December. Until then, "Python gateways are slow and have too many dependencies" still works as a story, though it's an inference. After that you'll need a different angle.
What would show this analysis is wrong: (1) Respan Gateway speeds up again before late November, with weekly growth back above 300, and not because of another promo push. That would mean the product itself is spreading organically, and this track still has room for a solo builder. (2) A solo-built gateway companion (say, cost accounting) reaches a thousand stars within a month. That would mean "build a companion" is a wider path than this analysis assumes.
Research notes: competitor table, acquisition evidence, full research report
- Competitors
Name Where Launched Scale How it differs from this one LiteLLM Open source 2023-07 62.8k stars, +456 this week The Python de facto standard, from which Respan migrated. Two supply-chain poisonings are the target of Respan's story, but LiteLLM has announced that all of /v1/messages will be Rust before 12-01 Portkey gateway Open source 2023-08 13.3k stars The same "open-source gateway + hosted observability" model, written in TypeScript. Respan's pitch centers on its plugin core and performance Bifrost (Maxim) Open source 2025-03 9.4k stars, +184 this week Go. Also sells performance and an MCP gateway. The Respan README uses it as the comparison target TensorZero Open source 2024-07 11.7k stars Also Rust, but focused on optimization and experiment loops rather than plugin-based integration agentgateway Open source 2025-03 6k stars, +181 this week Rust, a neutral Linux Foundation project, native MCP/A2A. Respan is a company product that feeds back into its own SaaS Helicone ai-gateway Open source 2025-04 642 stars Nearly the same positioning (Rust + observability company), but no launch push, and star growth has stalled OmniRoute Open source 2026-02 84.8k stars, +2283 this week Aggregates free quotas for coding agents. A consumer-facing use case new-api / one-api Open source 2023 51k / 37k stars A distribution and resale panel for the Chinese-speaking market mozilla-ai otari / any-llm Open source 2026-04 / 2025-07 845 / 2.2k stars A lightweight gateway from a large institution. No cross-protocol translation or voice antirion Open source 2026-10-17 538 stars, +83 this week Same-period, same pitch (fastest, single binary, built-in console). A personal project with no hosted business OpenRouter / Vercel AI Gateway / Cloudflare AI Gateway Big-company features 2023-2025 Big Hosted only, can't self-host. The Respan website specifically contrasts this Kong / Envoy AI Gateway / APISIX / Higress Open source Early Tens of thousands of stars A traditional API gateway with AI plugins, aimed at ops teams - Where users come from
- Verified YC Launch HN: Launch HN 2026-10-20 53 points 24 comments (item 50167583); commenters question it: "thread full of bots"
- Verified Tech media and aggregators ran the same story the same day: The New Stack 10-20 wrote it up; AI Weekly, Tech Debrief, PromptZone, daily.dev, explainx, diffvibe, theterminal.space and others (10-20~10-25) repeated the same "100k lines of LiteLLM wrapper" story
- Verified dev.to promo account network: devstackhub, elsie-rainee, sidra-jefferi, devers, debugtodeploy, mayur-upadhyay posted Respan posts in a tight window (10-21~10-26), while also pushing same-theme content on scraping proxies and vibe coding tools; many posts got 0 likes, which looks like an agency placing posts
- Verified LinkedIn company and employee posts: Respan company page "Open-sourcing Respan Gateway", Hendrix Liu post, 10-20
- Verified Rust community X account: Rust Bytes (@rustaceans_rs) posted 10-26 02:20Z; +76 that day was the peak
- Inferred Riding a rival's incident: LiteLLM v1.107.0 was poisoned on 10-21, Microsoft published an analysis on 10-23, and Respan launched right after; we found no official Respan post directly riding this incident
- Inferred Reddit technical posts: r/mlops "How a small, decoupled LLM gateway compares…only 31MB" and r/LLMDevs "5 OpenAI-compatible lies…" are likely from the team; the post bodies were not read (403)
- Inferred Existing customers and YC network: self-described as serving thousands of organizations; 2026-09 sponsored the Gradient VC × DeepMind hackathon
Why respanai/respan-gateway took off
Research date 2026-11-06. Data sources: our GitHub database (repo_profile / data card daily, from 2026-10-22), GitHub API, HN Algolia, Jina/Exa search, dev.to API, PyPI/crates.io stats.
Bottom line
This isn't a "wild open-source project went viral on its own" story. It's an open-source lead magnet from YC W24 company Respan (formerly Keywords AI, which raised a $5M seed in 2026-03) for its hosted gateway: 10-20 Launch HN, plus same-day media, LinkedIn and dev.to paid placements. The next day (10-21), LiteLLM's release pipeline was poisoned again, which turned the "we rewrote it in Rust because LiteLLM is unstable" narrative into a live news hook. 10-26 was picked up by the Rust community account Rust Bytes, which drove +76 stars in a single day. Content seeding then kept it at roughly +15~40 stars a day. The total of 570 stars (42 days) is a small number for the LLM gateway category.
1. What it is
- A single-binary LLM gateway in Rust: translates between four protocols (OpenAI Chat/Responses, Anthropic Messages, Gemini), connects to 16 vendors plus any OpenAI-compatible endpoint; cross-vendor Realtime voice interop (OpenAI Realtime client ↔ Gemini Live); attach MCP tools to the gateway so plain chat requests can use tools (tool loop); routing, fallback, retries, hedged requests; local web UI for request logs; "everything is a plugin", with the Mistral provider at only 22 lines. (README, github.com/respanai/respan-gateway)
- Self-reported benchmarks: added latency p50 0.07ms, 56,734 req/s, 31MB memory, compared with Bifrost 0.16ms/18,182/s/488MB, Portkey, and LiteLLM (1 worker) at 4.34ms/268/s. All vendor self-tests with no methodology (a theterminal.space article 10-23 specifically pointed this out, and the Launch HN post itself says pre-alpha).
- Business model: open source is the free part; the money is in the hosted respan.ai product: 1000+ model unified billing (the site advertises discounts like "GPT-6.1 Terra 7 off, DeepSeek 5.5 off"), observability, evals, red-teaming. The open-source gateway's
[plugins.respan]sends traces straight back to the Respan platform. (https://www.respan.ai/ai-gateway)
2. Growth data and timeline
| Date | Event | Stars (data card daily) |
|---|---|---|
| 09-25 | Repo created | – |
| 10-19/20 | v0.1.0, crates.io release (10-20 03:40Z) | – |
| 10-20 15:09Z | Launch HN: Respan (YC W24) – Open-source Rust AI gateway built around plugins, 53 points / 24 comments (HN item 50167583) | – |
| 10-20 | Same day, The New Stack ran "Respan spent two years building on LiteLLM. One upgrade made it start over"; company and employee LinkedIn posts; explainx, pocketgazette, diffvibe, grafy, daily.dev and other aggregators reposted it | – |
| 10-21 | LiteLLM release pipeline compromised, v1.107.0 on PyPI/Docker shipped with credential-stealing malware (LiteLLM official incident page); this is LiteLLM's second supply-chain incident in 2026 (it was already poisoned by TeamPCP in March 1.82.7/1.82.8) | – |
| 10-21~10-26 | 6+ accounts on dev.to posted "Exploring Respan Gateway"-style posts in a cluster | 10-22: 113 |
| 10-23 | Microsoft's security blog published an analysis of LiteLLM 1.107.0; when theterminal.space read it, the repo had 141 stars | 10-23: 134 |
| 10-25 | v0.3.0 released | 10-25: 216(+50) |
| 10-26 02:20Z | Rust Bytes (@rustaceans_rs) posted an introduction; the same day LiteLLM announced that its /v1/messages path was fully rewritten in Rust | 10-26: 292 (+76, peak day) |
| 10-27~11-06 | Daily +15~40 | 11-06: 570,fork 86 |
- Last 7 days +176, first 7 days +260; it is slowing (data card). GitHub API reading at 11-06: 582 stars / 90 forks / 36 watchers.
- Real usage is small: PyPI
respan-gatewayhad 423 downloads last week and 31 yesterday (pypistats); crates.io total downloads 40. - Commits are almost entirely from one person: lihe07 with 436 commits, second place 10 commits (GitHub contributors). The founder admitted on HN: "we generated the code with Claude and reviewed it line by line."
3. Competitors
The LLM gateway category is extremely crowded (our GitHub database, 2026-11-06):
| Product | Form | Launched | Scale | How Respan differs |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| LiteLLM (BerriAI) | Open-source Python | 2023-07 | 62.8k stars, +456 this week | The de facto standard; Respan migrated off it. Two supply-chain poisonings + 10-26 announced its core is moving to Rust, a direct answer to the "Python is slow" critique |
| OmniRoute | Open source | 2026-02 | 84.8k stars, +2283 this week | Aggregates free quotas from coding agents, aimed at consumers getting free usage; not the same crowd as enterprise gateways |
| new-api / one-api | Open source Go/JS | 2023 | 51k / 37k stars | Chinese-market distribution/resale dashboard |
| CLIProxyAPI | Open-source Go | 2025-07 | 57.7k stars | Turns subscription accounts into APIs; a different use case |
| Portkey gateway | Open source TS + hosted | 2023-08 | 13.3k stars | Same "open-source gateway + hosted observability" business model; Respan's direct comparison |
| Bifrost (Maxim) | Open source Go + hosted | 2025-03 | 9.4k stars, +184 this week | Also leads with performance benchmarks and an MCP gateway; Respan uses it as a comparison target in its README |
| TensorZero | Open source Rust | 2024-07 | 11.7k stars | Also Rust, more focused on optimization/experimentation loops |
| agentgateway (Linux Foundation) | Open source Rust | 2025-03 | 6k stars, +181 this week | Rust, MCP/A2A native, vendor-neutral |
| Helicone ai-gateway | Open source Rust | 2025-04 | 642 stars | Nearly the same positioning (Rust + from an observability company), but it didn't take off, showing that "a Rust gateway" alone doesn't guarantee stars |
| Envoy AI Gateway / Kong / APISIX / Higress | Open-source API gateway plugin | Early | Tens of thousands of stars | Traditional API gateway with AI plugins |
| mozilla-ai otari / any-llm | Open source | 2026-04 / 2025-07 | 845 / 2.2k stars | Lightweight gateway from a large organization |
| antirion | Open source | 2026-10-17 | 538 stars, +83 this week | Nearly simultaneous, same pitch ("fastest, single binary, built-in console") |
| OpenRouter / Vercel AI Gateway / Cloudflare AI Gateway | Hosted / big-vendor features | – | Big | Cannot be self-hosted; Respan's site specifically notes "OpenRouter can't be run yourself" |
4. Where users come from (growth tactics)
- YC Launch HN (confirmed): 10-20 post, 53 points. A YC company's Launch HN can keep a post on the front page for a while. Commenters directly asked "why is this entire thread full of bots?", and many comments are formatted long-form takes along the lines of "plugin boundary matters…", possibly someone steering the discussion (unverified).
- Media/aggregator coverage on the same day (confirmed): The New Stack published that day (with a reporter-interview narrative), followed by AI Weekly, Tech Debrief, PromptZone, daily.dev, explainx, diffvibe, grafy, pocketgazette, theterminal.space (two articles), and others. Most are aggregator or AI-generated sites that repeat the same "100k lines of LiteLLM wrapper code" story. This is a carefully prepared, easily repeated founding story.
- dev.to promo network (confirmed, highly likely paid): Dev Stack Hub, Elsie Rainee, Sidra Jefferi, Devers, Vinay Shah (debugtodeploy), and Mayur Upadhyay posted "Exploring Respan Gateway / plugin-first" pieces in a cluster between 10-21 and 10-26. Checking the dev.to API, these accounts in the same period also posted same-theme content on "scraping proxy layers," "11 vibe coding tools," "AI design-to-code tools," and a developer edition of "Truth or Dare". Devers and debugtodeploy each got 0 likes. This is a typical agency promo-account network placing posts for several clients at once.
- LinkedIn (confirmed): company page "Open-sourcing Respan Gateway: the last AI gateway you'll have to switch to" plus a post by employee Hendrix Liu, 10-20.
- Rust community account (confirmed): Rust Bytes posted 10-26, corresponding to the largest single-day +76 of the whole period. Whether it was paid is unknown.
- Riding current events (timing confirmed, no direct piggybacking found): LiteLLM's 10-21 poisoning and Microsoft's 10-23 write-up landed one day after Respan's launch. Respan's whole narrative is "LiteLLM is unreliable, so we rewrote it." We found no official Respan post directly riding this incident, but Reddit r/mlops and r/LLMDevs have posts like "How a small, decoupled LLM gateway compares to the large ones: only 31MB…" and "5 OpenAI-compatible lies we ran into building an AI gateway", written in a voice that reads like the team (Reddit bodies couldn't be read; authorship unverified).
- Existing company base (inferred): Respan/Keywords AI says it serves "thousands of organizations" and 100+ enterprise customers. Exposure in the community came from the YC alumni network and 2026-09 sponsorship: the Gradient VC × Google DeepMind open-source model hackathon (posts on X by DynamicWebPaige and others).
5. Why it took off
- A founding story that's easy to retell + good timing: "Rewrote 100k lines on top of LiteLLM, one upgrade broke everything, had to backfill by hand". Anyone who has used LiteLLM relates. The day after launch, LiteLLM was poisoned again, and "a Python proxy holding all your API keys is a supply-chain risk" became the hot take. The Rust single binary with 5 core-crate dependencies fit that story exactly.
- A YC company's launch machine: Launch HN + same-day press piece + LinkedIn + a dev.to content matrix + Rust community accounts. Not organic spread. The star curve shows it too: no single real spike (peak day 76), just many small pushes stacked together.
- The README reads like a product: a comparison table that names LiteLLM / Bifrost / Portkey and wins on every row;
pip installas a one-liner with no config; an example of "calling GPT through the Anthropic SDK" that hits the pain point directly; a hero image plus a demo video. - The feature surface is genuinely wide: cross-vendor realtime voice, MCP tools attached to any model, hedged requests. Few open-source gateways have these.
6. Differentiation
- Claimed differentiators: (a) Nginx-style "small core + everything is a plugin", where you write your own crate to add a protocol, vendor, or feature; (b) bidirectional translation across four client protocols, not just "OpenAI-compatible"; (c) cross-vendor realtime voice; (d) an MCP tool loop that lets any model use tools; (e) performance and memory.
- Is the product why it took off? Partly. The HN discussion centered on the plugin model (compile-time crates, not WASM or dynamic loading), so the architecture was a talking point. But the stars came mainly from the launch and content distribution, and the numbers (570) are negligible for this category. Helicone's ai-gateway, also Rust and from an observability company, has only 642 stars, and TensorZero and agentgateway are both far bigger. The differentiation isn't enough to explain the growth on its own. What explains it is the YC launch, the timing of the LiteLLM incident, and paid content blanketing the feeds.
- Risks: the performance numbers are not independently verified; the project calls itself pre-alpha; third-party plugins compiled into the process are the supply-chain surface HN questioned; LiteLLM has announced a full Rust migration of /v1/messages before 12-01, so the performance edge window will narrow.
7. Visibility
Buzz in small circles: a Launch HN and one proper write-up from The New Stack; the rest is aggregator sites and promo accounts. On X, our corpus has almost no discussion (x-radar search for "respan gateway" returns 0 results). This is an open-source lead magnet for a B2B business, so there's no "public revenue" angle. The company's $5M raise is public (SiliconANGLE), though: 2026-03.
8. Copycats
No copycats found. Antirion, which appeared at the same time (10-17 built from scratch, with the same "fastest, single binary" pitch), is a parallel competitor, not a follower. If anything, LiteLLM itself announced a Rust migration plan in 10-26, which reads as a response to this kind of attack.
9. Takeaways
- Give your open-source project a one-sentence "why I rewrote it" story that people can repeat, and name the incumbent's pain point. Media and aggregators will copy the story word for word.
- Put a named comparison table in the README (even if it's self-benchmarked), a zero-config one-line start, and counterintuitive examples like "call model B through vendor A's SDK".
- On launch day, coordinate LinkedIn, a tech press piece, dev.to promo accounts, and language-community accounts (Rust Bytes). Small pushes stacked together make a sustained curve.
- Build a plugin into the open-source piece that sends traces back to your own SaaS (
[plugins.respan]sends traces), so open-source stars become the funnel for the hosted business. - When a competitor has an incident, your narrative should already be in place. Timing can't be planned, but the story can be written in advance.
10. Uncertain
- Whether the Rust Bytes tweet and the dev.to matrix were paid: the dev.to account behavior looks very much like an agency, but there's no direct evidence of payment.
- The "bots" accusation in the HN comments is unverified.
- The author and engagement of the Reddit thread (Reddit 403 is not readable).
- Star timing: the GitHub stargazers API returns 404 for this repo, so we can't check the daily counts for 10-20~10-21 or whether stars were bought.
- How many signups or revenue the hosted business got from this: no public data.
Sources
- Repo README / releases / contributors: github.com/respanai/respan-gateway
- Launch HN:news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50167583
- The New Stack:thenewstack.io/respan-rust-ai-gateway/
- theterminal.space benchmark check: theterminal.space/software/respan-gateway-rust-llm-gateway-p…
- LiteLLM 10-21 incident: docs.litellm.ai/blog/security-incident-oct-21-2026; Microsoft analysis: www.microsoft.com/en-us/security/blog/2026/10/23/inside-the-…
- LiteLLM Rust migration: docs.litellm.ai/blog/rust-migration-rerouted
- Rust Bytes tweet: x.com/rustaceans_rs/status/2114542657032671704
- dev.to posts: dev.to/devstackhub/i-explored-respan-gateway-a-plugin-first-… and others (authors devstackhub / elsie-rainee / sidra-jefferi / devers / debugtodeploy / mayur-upadhyay)
- Funding: siliconangle.com/2026/03/18/respan-raises-5m-bring-proactive…; YC page: www.ycombinator.com/companies/respan
- Hosted business: www.respan.ai/ai-gateway
- PyPI downloads: pypistats.org/api/packages/respan-gateway/recent
- Competitor stars: from our github repo_profile, 2026-11-06