What you need right now: an OpenAI API key (or Anthropic, Groq, etc.
— any of the 13 providers). Nothing else.
1. Install — 30 seconds
2. Your first call — 30 seconds
3. Switch providers with one string — 1 minute
Same function, same message shape, different provider. No new SDK, no new auth code:ANTHROPIC_API_KEY, GROQ_API_KEY,
DEEPSEEK_API_KEY, …). The 13-provider matrix is in the completion
reference.
4. Add fallbacks — 1 minute
Production calls that survive one provider being down:5. Done. What you now have.
OpenAI-compatible
Same message format, same response shape. Any existing code moves over.
13 providers
Switch at any time. One string change, no auth rewrite.
Cost + latency by default
_cost and _latency_ms on every response. No setup.Production fallbacks
Survive provider outages without writing retry logic yourself.
Where to go next
Drop in over the OpenAI SDK
Point existing OpenAI code at OpenTracy — zero library changes.
~2 minutes.
~2 minutes.
Semantic auto-routing
Let the router pick the cheapest model that’s good enough per prompt.
~5 minutes (downloads ~100 MB of weights once).
~5 minutes (downloads ~100 MB of weights once).
Full observability
Self-host to capture every trace in ClickHouse + a UI for analytics.
~30 minutes (needs Docker).
~30 minutes (needs Docker).
Distill your own model
Fine-tune a tiny student from your traffic. The cost-reduction wedge.
~2 hours (needs self-host + a GPU).
~2 hours (needs self-host + a GPU).
Optional: try the semantic auto-router
If you want to see the full pipeline in action — including the model picking itself per prompt based on learned error profiles — load the pre-trained router. This downloads ~100 MB of weights on first run and caches them in~/.local/share/opentracy/.

