Maker of ILTER here — ask me anything before I launch

Hey 👋 I'm the maker of ILTER, launching on Product Hunt next Tuesday — and I wanted a place to actually talk with you before then, not just pitch.

Quick what-it-is: ILTER is a self-hosted AI gateway that sits between your app and AI providers. Any OpenAI-compatible client routes through ILTER to 9 different providers. Single binary, zero config, embedded dashboard. ./ilter serve and it's running.

• 🧩 MCP Gateway & Marketplace: Connect AI to your APIs, CRM, or MCP servers — zero changes required.

• ⚡ Smart Router: Every request is scored for complexity in real time and routed to the right model tier.

• 🌐 Smart Fallback: Provider down or rate-limited? ILTER fails over to another key or provider, no changes.

• 💰 Budget Control: Hard daily/monthly spending limits per key — traffic cuts off the instant a limit is hit.

• 🪪 PII Guard: Emails, SSNs, and other sensitive data are masked before they ever leave your network.

• 🧠 Semantic Cache: Queries are served from cache — vector search with SHA-256 exact-match fallback.

• 🛡️ Prompt Guardrails: Blocks injection, toxic content, and off-topic requests before they reach the model.

• 🌀 Agent Loop Detector: Catches loops by rate, fingerprint, cost, or depth before burning budget.

• ⏱️ Cron Engine: Schedule recurring AI workflows with standard cron expressions — no external queue needed.

• 📡 Observability: Prometheus metrics and OpenTelemetry tracing, ready for Grafana, Datadog, or Honeycomb.

• 📊 Dashboard: Embedded web UI for KPIs, audit logs, API keys, and built-in chat playground — no server.

I built this solo, so I'd genuinely rather field your hard questions than sell you. Things people usually ask:

• MCP Gateway — how does tool interception actually work, and what happens when an MCP server itself goes down?

• Semantic Cache — how do you avoid serving a stale or wrong-context answer from a vector match?

• Smart Router — who scores complexity, and can you override its tier decision per-request?

• Smart Fallback — when it fails over from OpenAI to Anthropic mid-outage, what's the exact trigger, and how fast?

Ask me anything — about the product, the decisions I made, what I'd change, whatever. I'll be around all week.