Your three options, honestly compared
| Path | Setup time | Risk | Best for |
|---|---|---|---|
| Another commercial relay | Minutes | High — same failure mode as AIProxy | Quick experiments, tiny balances |
| Cloud AI platforms (Azure OpenAI, Bedrock) | Hours–days | Low, but regional availability and enterprise onboarding | Companies with cloud accounts |
| Self-hosted gateway + direct accounts | An evening | Low — you own every piece | Developers & teams who want it solved permanently |
If you choose a relay: the 5-point vetting checklist
- Identifiable operator. A real company name you can verify beats a Telegram handle. AIProxy had a registered company and still vanished — a nameless operator is strictly worse.
- Domain age and history. Check the Wayback Machine. Relays younger than six months die most often; fresh domains "relaunching" a dead brand are usually scams.
- Small top-ups only. Never keep more balance than you'd shrug off losing. Weekly top-ups beat one big deposit, whatever the volume discount promises.
- Latency and model freshness. Test GPT-4-class and Claude-class endpoints before paying. Relays that lag weeks behind on new models are reselling through other relays.
- Privacy expectations. Assume the relay logs every prompt. If any request contains customer data or secrets, a relay is disqualified — go direct.
The self-hosted route, step by step
This is what most former AIProxy users actually migrate to, because it recreates the same convenience — one endpoint, many models, per-key billing — without the trust problem:
- Deploy a gateway. One API or New API on any $5 VPS via Docker. You get the familiar dashboard: channels, tokens, per-user quotas.
- Add direct provider accounts. OpenAI, Anthropic, Google — your keys, your balance, launch-day model access.
- Route through a static residential proxy. If your region is unsupported or your server sits in a flagged datacenter range, point the gateway's outbound traffic at a static residential IP in the US or EU. Providers see a normal home connection.
Three mistakes former relay users make
- Using datacenter IPs for provider accounts. OpenAI and Anthropic score datacenter ranges aggressively; accounts registered or accessed this way get flagged. Residential IPs exist precisely for this.
- Rotating IPs on API accounts. Rotation is for scraping, not for account access. A provider account that logs in from a different country every day looks stolen. Use static residential.
- Putting the whole team on one shared relay key. Whether relay or gateway, issue per-person tokens with quotas — that's exactly what One API's token system is for.