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Busbar is a single binary you run in your own infrastructure, sitting between your applications and every AI provider. One endpoint to route and fail over chat, embeddings, images, and audio across providers, enforce hard budget caps, provision or revoke access, and see every request’s cost, latency, and traffic.
Every serious AI application is becoming multi-model and multi-provider. You want Claude for one thing, GPT for another, a cheap model for classification, and a fallback when your primary is rate-limited. The moment you have more than one provider, something has to sit between your app and all of them. That something is a gateway.
The gateways that exist today mostly do two things. They flatten every provider to OpenAI’s shape, and they retry on failure. Both are quietly lossy. And none are a true AI Control Plane.
Flattening to OpenAI throws away what makes each provider worth using: Anthropic’s thinking blocks, Gemini’s safety settings, Bedrock’s tool-use envelope. You get portability by giving up capability.
Retry-on-failure is error handling, not failover. The call throws, and then something retries, after your user already felt the stall. And a naive retry can hammer a provider that’s already down.
Neither is wrong, exactly. They’re just not enough once the gateway is load-bearing infrastructure.
What I’m building
Busbar is you AI Control Plane
Lossless translation, both ways. Speak any of six wire protocols in, any provider out, through a superset intermediate representation, so native features survive the hop instead of being flattened away.
Failover inside the request. Reroute across providers before the client sees a byte, even mid-stream, within a deadline and hop budget. The user never sees the stumble.
A circuit breaker that knows whose fault it is. Classify each failure (provider outage, your bad request, context-length, auth or billing) and treat each differently, instead of retrying into a wall.
One static Rust binary. No Python sidecar, no interpreter, no GC in the request path. Your keys, your network, your data path.
Why me, why now
Multi-model is going mainstream this year, and the control plane is where the reliability and portability promises get made or broken. I think the right architecture is reliability-first and lossless, not OpenAI-shaped and retry-based, and I’d rather build that from the metal up than bolt it onto an interpreted proxy.
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About Busbar on Product Hunt
“Your AI Control Plane”
Busbar was submitted on Product Hunt and earned 0 upvotes and 1 comments, placing #92 on the daily leaderboard. Busbar is a single binary you run in your own infrastructure, sitting between your applications and every AI provider. One endpoint to route and fail over chat, embeddings, images, and audio across providers, enforce hard budget caps, provision or revoke access, and see every request’s cost, latency, and traffic.
Busbar was featured in Developer Tools (515.9k followers), Artificial Intelligence (473.8k followers), GitHub (41.3k followers) and Security (2.8k followers) on Product Hunt. Together, these topics include over 213.4k products, making this a competitive space to launch in.
Who hunted Busbar?
Busbar was hunted by Matthew Jackson. A “hunter” on Product Hunt is the community member who submits a product to the platform — uploading the images, the link, and tagging the makers behind it. Hunters typically write the first comment explaining why a product is worth attention, and their followers are notified the moment they post. Around 79% of featured launches on Product Hunt are self-hunted by their makers, but a well-known hunter still acts as a signal of quality to the rest of the community. See the full all-time top hunters leaderboard to discover who is shaping the Product Hunt ecosystem.
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Matthew Jackson