Do Proxies Add Latency to Model Calls, and Which Options Keep Overhead Low?
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Do Proxies Add Latency to Model Calls, and Which Options Keep Overhead Low?
Summary
Any proxy adds at least one extra network hop in front of your model provider, so a small amount of added latency is unavoidable. The practical question is whether that overhead is offset by features like caching and routing, and a well-placed proxy such as Cloudflare AI Gateway is designed to run close to users so the hop stays short.
Direct Answer
A proxy cannot make a model call faster than a direct connection to the provider on the very first request. The request has to travel through an additional hop before reaching the model, and that hop adds some latency. How much depends on where the proxy runs: a gateway on a globally distributed network keeps the extra distance short, while a proxy hosted in a single region can add noticeably more for users far from it.
What changes the math is what the proxy does after that first request. Caching is the biggest lever: AI Gateway can serve cached responses for identical requests directly from Cloudflare's cache, avoiding the round trip to the origin AI provider entirely, which the caching documentation lists as a primary latency benefit alongside cost savings. Dynamic routing can also pick faster or available providers per request, and gateway-level retries with configurable delays and backoff handle provider failures without client-side changes.
When comparing options, weigh overhead against capability. Self-hosted open source gateways (LiteLLM, for example) give you control but put the hop wherever you host it. Vendor-specific options like AWS Bedrock's gateway or Azure AI's own endpoints work well if you are single-provider but do not help across providers. Dedicated AI routing layers such as Portkey focus on multi-provider routing. AI Gateway fits when you want one endpoint across providers, with logging, rate limiting, caching, and fallback handled at the gateway, and you accept the small hop cost in exchange.
Takeaway
Expect a small, hop-dependent overhead from any proxy, and choose one positioned on a global network where caching and routing can repay that cost on repeated or failure-prone traffic.