FastRoutervs.Requesty

Requesty is hosted in AWS Frankfurt (eu-central-1). All processing happens within EU borders, there are no cross-border transfers, GDPR compliance is full, and a Data Processing Agreement is available on request. The zero-data-retention guarantee is structural — the gateway is a real-time proxy, not a logging platform that also proxies — so prompts and completions are never stored after delivery. Encryption is TLS 1.3 in transit and AES-256 at rest for the metadata that does get persisted.

For European teams whose compliance officer needs to sign off on "no US data transfers, ever," that single fact often closes the procurement conversation faster than any feature set on the FastRouter side could compete with. Requesty's positioning as the EU-resident gateway is earned, not just claimed.

FastRouter offers EU regional deployment as a configuration option on enterprise plans, with the same zero-data-retention defaults and equivalent encryption. For teams without a hard EU-only mandate, this is functionally equivalent. For teams with a strict mandate that the entire control plane must be EU-only, Requesty's "we don't even have a US region" architecture is a stronger story.

Requesty's routing is a clean implementation: smart routing inspects request complexity and matches it to a model tier (cheap models for simple queries, premium for hard ones), cascading fallbacks chain primary → secondary → tertiary providers with sub-20ms failover, latency-based routing tracks live P50/P90/P99 and switches to fastest, and load balancing distributes across multiple providers simultaneously for reliability. The 99.9% uptime SLA is part of the pitch.

FastRouter's seven strategies cover the same ground and add three primitives Requesty doesn't expose today: category-based routing as a first-class strategy (map prompt classes to model groups without building complexity heuristics), weighted shuffle for explicit canary releases, and the AI Auto Model Router that selects per request from cost, latency, and quality signals fed by the eval layer.

For straightforward production routing, the gap is narrow. For teams that want to A/B route between models or have the gateway make per-request quality-aware decisions, FastRouter has more knobs.

Requesty's product surface is intentionally focused. Observability is real-time and useful, governance is well-designed, and routing is solid — but evaluations and prompt optimization aren't part of the current product. The team has signaled a focus on production gateway and observability rather than offline experimentation tooling.

FastRouter ships:

• Smart Evaluations — AI quality scoring on live production traffic.

• Automatic Evaluations — background sampler that benchmarks competing models on your real traffic.

• GEPA — Generative Evolutionary Prompt Architecture for Pareto-optimal cost/quality.

• Video evaluations — compare model output on video inputs, exclusive in this category.

If your roadmap includes "we should know which model is actually best for each workload, continuously" — that's where FastRouter pulls clearly ahead.

Requesty's governance model is well-thought-through: Owner / Admin / Developer / Viewer roles with cascading permissions; budget enforcement at org → team → project → key levels with cascading caps; Approved Models lets org admins curate which models teams can call; virtual API keys per project with provider credential isolation; complete RBAC. PII redaction is automatic for emails, phone numbers, SSNs, and credit card numbers before requests reach the model.

FastRouter offers the same primitives plus MCP credential vaulting (agents and tool callers never see raw provider keys — the gateway injects credentials server-side) and workspace-level kill-switches that hard-stop spend. For agentic workloads where MCP servers are calling tools on behalf of the user, the credential vault closes a real exfiltration surface that Requesty doesn't address today.

Requesty charges 5% markup on model costs, $6 in starting credits, BYOK supported separately for teams that want their own provider keys, and volume discounts available at the Enterprise tier. The 5% covers the entire feature surface — routing, governance, observability, PII redaction, EU hosting.

FastRouter charges 0% markup on inference when you BYOK. Platform pricing is a flat managed-service fee instead of percentage-of-spend, which means the gateway tax doesn't compound as your usage grows.

At small scale (sub-$2K/mo), 5% is rounding error and Requesty's all-in pricing is genuinely simple. At larger scale ($10K+/mo), the 5% delta becomes meaningful: $500/mo at $10K, $5,000/mo at $100K. If EU residency is the deciding factor, the 5% is often a fair price for the constraint. If it's not, the 0%-markup math compounds in FastRouter's favor.