Respan Launches a Rust AI Gateway on Launch HN With 36 Stars and No Tagged Release

Respan, a Y Combinator Winter 2024 company, put an open-source Rust AI gateway on Hacker News, and the repository it points to has 36 stars, no tagged release and a hosted product whose pricing the launch post does not state. The gateway is the free part. The business is the hosted platform that runs it.

What the Launch HN post says it sells

The Launch HN post, written by a founder who posts as Andydy25 and signs as Andy, describes two products. The Respan Gateway is a Rust server where providers, protocols, modalities and features such as fallbacks and PII redaction are all plugins. The hosted platform runs that gateway and adds observability, evals and unified billing. The post links a pricing page but gives no figure, and it names no other founder.

At the time of reading, the post had 31 points. Respan did not say in the post how much it has raised.

A LiteLLM wrapper that outgrew its base

The post says Respan's gateway began in 2024 as a layer over LiteLLM, the Python gateway, and that the wrapper code once passed 100,000 lines. It says a January LiteLLM upgrade caused intermittent connection errors and a rollback, that the cause is unknown, and that the team now backports upstream fixes by hand. That is the post's reason for a rewrite.

The plugins are compiled Rust crates, not dynamically loaded modules, the author said in a reply to a commenter. A 22-line Mistral provider is the post's example of how little a new vendor takes. The post also says the gateway can translate between API formats, so an app built for OpenAI's Realtime API can talk to Gemini Live, though not every feature maps across.

The repository against the post

The respan-gateway repository is dual-licensed MIT or Apache-2.0 and showed 36 stars, five forks, four open issues, three open pull requests and 389 commits on main. The post calls the project pre-alpha.

Two details do not line up. The post says binaries are on GitHub Releases. The README says "No release is tagged yet" and tells readers to build from source until the first tag, and the Releases section was empty when fetched. The README also mentions cargo install respan-gateway and a Python package, while the Packages section was empty.

The post says much of the code was generated by Claude and reviewed line by line. A commenter, verdverm, questioned the supply-chain risk of a plugin-per-crate model and flagged custom MCP OAuth code in the repo as a security concern. Andydy25 replied that crates carry supply-chain risk but the source can be reviewed.

The upstream is also moving to Rust

LiteLLM published its own Rust gateway plan on June 22, 2026, written by Ishaan Jaffer, its chief technology officer. It calls the Rust server early beta and schedules the full server for Dec. 1. The figures below are LiteLLM's own, measured on its harness, which it says tests the forwarding path and "not a full production workload".

1. LiteLLM Rust gateway6782 req/s
2. LiteLLM Python453 req/s

Source: LiteLLM Rust launch post, June 22, 2026, accessed 2026-10-20

Metric	LiteLLM Rust	LiteLLM Python
Per-request overhead	about 0.05 ms	about 7.5 ms
Peak memory under load	about 31.7 MB	about 358.9 MB

Respan's pitch is therefore a compiled gateway from a company that no longer depends on LiteLLM. The project it left is shipping the same architecture. Respan published no benchmark of its own, and its README lists more than 15 vendors, including OpenAI, Anthropic, Gemini, Groq, Ollama and vLLM.

The first thing that would settle the release question is a tagged build on the repository. LiteLLM's full Rust server is due Dec. 1.

Related reading: Cloudflare's tsrs Rust port claims 8x over TypeScript 7.0, and OpenCode's security policy says its permission prompts are not a sandbox.