A Sovereign Cloudflare AI Gateway Alternative
Cloudflare AI Gateway puts caching, limits and logs in front of your model calls, at its edge. The Scrydon AI Gateway puts identity, policy and audit in front of them, in your perimeter — and follows the call into the tools your agents use next.
Cloudflare AI Gateway is a hosted proxy you point your model calls through: one endpoint per gateway, caching, rate limits, retries, logs and analytics, and optional key storage, all running on Cloudflare's network. It is convenient and cheap. It is also, by design, a third party between your prompts and your models, and it knows nothing about who the person behind a call is. The Scrydon AI Gateway is the control point an organisation owns. It stands alone and can be deployed on its own.
Read this if you're a team already on Cloudflare weighing the convenience of an edge gateway against the sovereignty and attribution its security review will ask about.
Deploy the AI Gateway Starts at €500 / month on a yearly commitment, deployed on its own in a day.
The Scrydon AI Gateway is a sovereign alternative to Cloudflare AI Gateway: a single governed endpoint that speaks the standard model APIs so existing tools reach any model unchanged, deployed inside the organisation's own perimeter rather than at a provider's edge, where every call runs under the caller's own federated identity, against a clearance-gated model allowlist, with data loss prevention, a spend cap and an immutable audit trail, sharing one policy and one audit chain with governed tool calls and sandbox egress.
Cloudflare AI Gateway is a pragmatic product: change a base URL and your model calls gain caching, rate limiting, retries and fallbacks, request logs and analytics, and optionally the storage of provider keys so applications hold none — with Cloudflare's usual reach and price. For a consumer-facing application on Cloudflare it is a sensible layer. Its limits are the limits of an edge gateway. It is a hosted intermediary, so every prompt and response pass through a third party's network under its terms and jurisdiction; a gateway is an application-level object, so attribution stops at the application; there is no model policy tied to a person's clearance and no data loss prevention in the regulated sense; and it sees the model call only, while an agent's day is mostly tool calls. The Scrydon AI Gateway keeps the base-URL simplicity — the standard APIs, any model, unchanged tools — and moves the control point into your perimeter: a gateway key minted against a named person in your identity provider, the allowlist following that person's clearance, every call screened, metered against a cap and audited, and the same identity governing the tools the agent calls over MCP and the network its sandbox may reach.
In Your Perimeter
Air-gapped, on-premises or a European sovereign cloud. Prompts reach the vendors you chose, on your contracts, or open-weight models on your own hardware — no edge network in between.
Runs as a Person, Not an Application
Every call resolves through your identity provider to the human who made it, so spend is per developer, model access follows clearance, and revocation is removing the person.
Governance Past the Model Call
One policy and one audit chain across the model call, the tools the agent calls over MCP, and the egress of the sandbox those tools run in.
Cloudflare AI Gateway Alternative in the Scrydon platform
One integrated, sovereign architecture. Here is where Cloudflare AI Gateway Alternative sits — highlighted against the full stack it works with.
The AI OS for Humans & AI Agents
Ontology & Semantic Layer, one connected model for your data, knowledge & processes
Combining the best of data lakes, data warehouses and search
Governed access to every model, and the agents & workflows that execute across your systems
Integrate across A2A, MCP, legacy systems and data sources
Secure domain federation, trusted data sharing, and cross-boundary intelligence
Sovereign Foundations
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What Cloudflare AI Gateway adds at the edge, and what the AI Gateway adds in your perimeter
Cloudflare AI Gateway's strength is how little it asks: change a base URL and your model calls gain caching, rate limits, retries and fallbacks, logs and analytics, and optionally a place to keep provider keys so applications hold none — on a network most teams already use. The Scrydon AI Gateway asks the same of the developer and moves the control point into your perimeter: the call runs as a named person from your identity provider, the model allowlist follows that person's clearance, data loss prevention screens what leaves, the turn is metered against a cap you set, and the audit record settles before the stream finishes. Nothing passes through a third party's network on the way.
A base URL, unchanged tools — Both are adopted by changing an address. The AI Gateway speaks the Anthropic, OpenAI and Gemini dialects natively, so coding agents and applications run through it without modification.
Your perimeter, your contracts — Cloudflare AI Gateway is a hosted proxy at the edge. The AI Gateway is deployed where your production runs and reaches models on your own vendor contracts or on your own hardware.
A person, not an application — The AI Gateway mints keys against a named person in your identity provider; the allowlist follows that person's clearance; removing the person stops the next turn.
Screened, capped, audited — and followed — Data loss prevention and moderation run inline, the turn is metered against the organisation's cap, the audit record settles before the stream finishes, and the same chain covers the agent's tool calls and sandbox egress.
When the gateway has to pass the same tests as the workload
Cloudflare AI Gateway is a fair choice for a consumer-facing application that wants caching and logs in front of its model calls and already lives on Cloudflare. The gap opens when the gateway is asked to pass the same tests as the workload. A public body or regulated enterprise that has answered the sovereignty questions — whose jurisdiction, whose keys, what happens disconnected — cannot answer them differently for the proxy that sees every prompt. Nor can a gateway token tell an auditor which person made a call, or what their agent did next against systems the gateway never sees. The Scrydon AI Gateway is built for that organisation: every call attributable to a person, one policy and one audit chain across the model call, the tools the agent calls and the sandbox it runs in, deployed where your production runs — and deployable on its own before anything else is.
Scrydon AI Gateway vs Cloudflare AI Gateway
Both are adopted by changing a base URL and both log and meter model calls. One is a hosted proxy at a provider's edge; the other is a control point in your own perimeter that knows who the person is.
| Capability | Scrydon | Cloudflare AI Gateway |
|---|---|---|
| Where it runs | In your perimeter — air-gapped, on-premises or European cloud | Cloudflare's network; every prompt and response pass through it |
| Who the call runs as | The person, resolved through your identity provider, with their own delegated grants | An application's gateway and token; attribution per gateway or per metadata sent |
| Model calls governed | Clearance-gated allowlist, DLP, moderation, cap and immutable audit on every call | Rate limits, caching, retries and fallbacks, logs and analytics, optional guardrails |
| Tool calls governed | Same identity, policy and audit chain as the model call | Not in that path |
| Where the vendor key lives | On the platform; never issued to a developer | Optionally stored with the gateway, or sent by the application |
| Cost attribution | Per person, per team or unit, and per turn, by model, capability and workflow, with an on-pace projection and a cap | Per gateway and model, with cost estimates in analytics |
| Sovereignty | Passes the jurisdiction, keys and disconnected-operation tests | A third-party processor by design; no disconnected mode |
| Pricing model | Fixed monthly fee for the cluster that carries your people, excluding hosting | Free tier, with paid features on Cloudflare plans |
A category comparison, written to orient: Cloudflare AI Gateway is a good edge proxy and we would not pretend otherwise — this website itself runs on Cloudflare. Cloudflare is a trademark of Cloudflare, Inc.; capabilities evolve — verify current details with the vendor.
Frequently asked questions
What is the best alternative to Cloudflare AI Gateway for a regulated organisation?+
How is the Scrydon AI Gateway different from Cloudflare AI Gateway?+
Is an edge gateway a sovereignty problem?+
Does the Scrydon AI Gateway cache like Cloudflare AI Gateway?+
Can we start with just the AI Gateway?+
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