Bridge by Wekoya / Guides / Which AI API gateway should a Nigerian startup use?

Which AI API gateway should a Nigerian startup use?

In short: Pick the gateway you can pay without friction and that protects your margins. For most Nigerian startups that means naira billing by bank transfer, OpenAI compatibility, budgets per customer and failover. Bridge by Wekoya was built for exactly that; OpenRouter and LiteLLM suit teams that pay in dollars or run their own servers.

Updated 8 November 2026

Seven questions to ask

1. How do we pay? Dollar cards get declined; naira by bank transfer does not.
2. Does it speak the OpenAI format? Then you are never locked in: switching is a base URL and a key.
3. Which models? You want GPT, Claude, Gemini and open-source models behind one key, so you can move when prices change.
4. Can we give each customer a budget? One heavy user should not eat your margin.
5. Can the team share one account, with roles and a limit per person?
6. What happens when a provider fails? A gateway that retries elsewhere keeps your product up.
7. Does it store our customers' prompts? For many buyers this decides the deal.

How Bridge answers them

• Naira balance, topped up by bank transfer to your own account number.
• OpenAI Chat Completions and Responses API, so the OpenAI SDK works unchanged.
• GPT, Claude, Gemini and 90+ models, priced in naira on the models page.
• Budgets per end user, short-lived guest keys for browsers and phones, and a naira limit per key.
• Company accounts with owner, admin, member and viewer roles, a limit per person and an audit log.
• If a provider fails before it starts answering, Bridge retries on another that serves the same model.
• Prompts, replies, images and files are not saved.

See Bridge for business