Great checklist! These are exactly the things you need to evaluate when picking an LLM gateway.

A few things we added to our own evaluation criteria:

• Protocol support: Does it support all three formats? Chat Completions, Responses, and Messages? Different tools speak different protocols.
• Model breadth: How many models are available? Can you switch between them without changing your code?
• Transparent pricing: Are all input/output/cache rates listed upfront? No surprise bills.
• No lock-in: Can you easily switch models if one provider raises prices or has an outage?

We ended up using JZS Token as our gateway. It checks all these boxes: 40+ models, all three protocols, transparent pricing, pay-as-you-go with no monthly commitment.

The key insight: the gateway should be invisible. Your code shouldn't know or care which provider is behind the scenes. If you can swap providers by changing one string in your config, you've picked the right one.

Good article. This checklist will save a lot of teams from picking the wrong tool.