Features
More than a proxy.
Routing a request to a provider is the easy part. Here's what happens when that provider is slow, down, or rate-limited — and how your keys and account stay secure.
Routing policies
Set one up from your dashboard and reference it in place of a single model:
{
"model": "policy/primary-with-backup",
"messages": [{ "role": "user", "content": "..." }]
}Fallback chains
An ordered list of provider/model entries, each with its own retry count. If the first entry is rate-limited, erroring, times out, or returns a structurally empty response, Airelay moves to the next one automatically — no code change on your side, no request lost.
Example: try Claude 3.5 Sonnet first, fall back to GPT-4o, then to a Groq-hosted Llama model as a last resort.
Load balancing
Give several entries a relative weight and Airelay picks one per request, proportionally. Useful for splitting traffic across two accounts with the same provider, or routing most requests to a cheaper model with a fraction going to a stronger one for comparison.
Detecting "unavailable"
A rate limit or a 500 is easy to catch. A provider that returns 200 with nothing useful isn't — no gateway can judge answer quality without your task's own context. Here's what Airelay actually does about it:
Circuit breaker
After a few consecutive failures against one of your keys, it's skipped proactively for a cooldown period instead of every request re-discovering the outage the slow way. The cooldown backs off the longer the failures continue.
Structural failure detection
A response with no completion choices at all counts as a failure and triggers fallback — deliberately narrow, so a legitimately short or tool-call-only answer is never mistaken for a broken one.
Feedback from your app
Every response carries an X-Airelay-Request-Id header. If your application (or a human reviewing the output) determines an answer was actually unhelpful, POST /v1/feedback with that id — it feeds the same circuit breaker, so a provider that keeps producing bad answers gets treated like one that's down.
Security
Two ways to store a key
By default, a connected provider key is Fernet-encrypted in Airelay's own database. Every organisation also gets its own Noviqent Vault space, provisioned automatically at signup — store a key there instead, and it's resolved only at the moment a request needs it.
Optional two-factor authentication
Turn on TOTP 2FA from your account's Security page — scan a QR code with any authenticator app, and a code is required on top of your password from then on. Off by default, on whenever you want it.
Registration also requires a strong password (12+ characters, mixed case, a number, a symbol) — enforced server-side, not just suggested.
Try it without a key
A small, curated set of models with a genuine no-cost provider tier work the moment you sign up — no provider key, no card. Funded by Airelay's own account with each provider, capped per organisation per day so it stays available for everyone.
gemini-1.5-flashGroq · llama-3.1-8b-instantGroq · llama-3.3-70b-versatileMistral · mistral-small-latestConnect your own key any time for full model access and higher limits.