The Stack, Layer by Layer
Select any layer to see what it does, who competes there, and how it scores on what builders care about.
How Requests Flow
A prompt never travels straight to a model. It moves through gateways, routers, regions, and serving clusters. Watch the packet trace below.
Throughput & Reliability Simulator
Infrastructure choices are tradeoffs. Adjust capacity, redundancy, and edge coverage to see how latency, uptime, and cost respond for a workload of one million daily requests.
Why the Battle Moves Down the Stack
Model quality is converging. Differentiation shifts to whoever delivers it fastest, cheapest, and most reliably.
Access
Rate limits, waitlists, and regional availability decide which builders can ship at all. Open capacity is a competitive weapon.
Reliability
An agent chain with ten model calls at 99% uptime each succeeds only 90% of the time. Infrastructure compounds, for better or worse.
Throughput
Tokens per second per dollar is the new benchmark. Serving optimizations often beat model upgrades on real product metrics.
API Stability
Silent model swaps and breaking schema changes destroy trust. Versioned, contract-stable APIs keep production teams onboard.