---
title: What is ScaiGrid
path: introduction/what-is-scaigrid
status: published
---

# What is ScaiGrid

ScaiGrid is a unified AI gateway. It sits between your application and every large language model provider you might want to call — OpenAI, Anthropic, Azure, Mistral, Google, Qwen, your own self-hosted models, anything else — and exposes a single, stable HTTP API on top of all of them.

You integrate once. Swap models, add providers, change routing policies, enforce budgets, and add capabilities without touching your application code.

## What it gives you

**One endpoint for every model.** Your application calls `POST /v1/inference/chat`. ScaiGrid handles provider selection, authentication to the upstream, retries, failover, and response normalization. Switching from GPT-4 to Claude Opus is an admin-UI toggle, not a code change.

**Multi-tenancy, from day one.** ScaiGrid has a three-level tenancy model: Partners, Tenants, Users. Every request is tagged with its tenant and user. Usage, budgets, rate limits, and access controls all scope cleanly. If you're a platform serving multiple customers, you don't need a second layer.

**Accounting, budgets, and audit.** Every completion is counted. Spend is tracked per tenant, per user, per model. Budgets enforce themselves at the gateway — a customer who hits their limit gets a 429, you never get a surprise bill. Full audit log for security review and compliance.

**Pluggable modules.** ScaiGrid is the platform, not the product. Modules add capabilities: an embeddable chatbot widget ([ScaiBot](/docs/scaigrid/scaibot)), vector-and-graph knowledge search ([ScaiMatrix](/docs/scaigrid/scaimatrix)), typed message queues ([ScaiQueue](/docs/scaigrid/scaiqueue)), sandboxed code execution ([ScaiBunker](/docs/scaigrid/scaibunker)), and more. Modules register themselves at startup, get their own URL namespace, their own permissions, their own admin UI pages.

**Drop-in OpenAI compatibility.** An `/oai/v1/` surface speaks the OpenAI API dialect exactly. Existing code that points at `api.openai.com/v1/chat/completions` can switch to ScaiGrid by changing the base URL. See [OpenAI Compatibility](../04-api-guides/07-openai-compatibility.md). For new code, use the native `/v1/` API — it's richer.

## What it's not

- **Not a model.** ScaiGrid doesn't train or host models itself. It routes to providers that do.
- **Not a notebook or playground.** There's an admin UI for operators and a chat playground for experimentation, but ScaiGrid is primarily an API.
- **Not a billing system.** ScaiGrid tracks usage and enforces budgets; it doesn't generate invoices or charge credit cards. Surface the usage data to your own billing pipeline.

## Who it's for

- **Platforms building on top of LLMs** that want a stable integration surface and multi-tenant cost control.
- **Teams integrating multiple providers** who don't want to maintain N provider-specific clients.
- **Operators of self-hosted models** who want a front door with auth, rate-limiting, and observability.
- **Anyone migrating off the OpenAI SDK** but not willing to rewrite their inference code. Drop-in works.

## What's next

- [Philosophy](./02-philosophy.md) — the design principles behind the API shape.
- [Architecture](./03-architecture.md) — how the pieces fit together.
- [Quickstart](../02-getting-started/01-quickstart.md) — your first chat completion in five minutes.