One gateway for every LLM call — routed, measured, and provably logged.
NautGate sits between your coding agents and every model provider. Claude Code, Codex, Pi and your own apps point at one endpoint; NautGate routes each call, records what actually happened, and tells you what it cost.
The point isn't routing — plenty of tools route. The point is evidence: for every call you can prove which model really answered, what data it saw, how long it took and what it cost.
Claude Code ─┐
Codex ───────┤ ┌─ Anthropic
Pi ──────────┼──► NautGate :8090 ───┼─ OpenAI
your app ────┘ │ ├─ OpenRouter
│ └─ LM Studio / local
└──► Postgres (audit, outcomes, analytics)
The Overview — live provider status, what you spent, what your subscription saved, and what the gateway learned from your traffic.
Ask a model which model it is and it tells you whatever its client's system prompt says. Claude Code asserts an identity in every request, so a routed model answers "I am Claude" no matter what generated the tokens. Self-report is worthless.
NautGate reads the model name from the provider's own response, never from the request — so the audit log is attested rather than assumed. That one property is what makes cost attribution, substitution detection and compliance reporting trustworthy.
Gateway
- OpenAI-compatible (
/v1/chat/completions) and Anthropic-compatible (/v1/messages) inbound - Two credential lanes: OAuth subscription traffic passes through untouched and free; metered keys get routed
- Per-key model override — pin any model to an API key and run Claude Code on it
- Local models via LM Studio, addressable as
lmstudio/<id> - Fail-closed confidential routing — send PII/secrets to a Settings-selected local model with no cloud fallback
Evidence
- Full audit log: policy-gated prompt/response capture, tokens, timings, cost
- Routing flow view — client → lane → decision → upstream → model actually served
- Silent-substitution detection when the served model differs from the requested one
- Sensitivity classification (PII/secrets) before anything is stored
- Deterministic Swiss/EU PII detection through Bowden, with matched values redacted from audit captures
Analytics
- Quality gate — post-hoc judge scoring with failure-mode buckets
- Head-to-head — real calls grouped by task, so models compare like-for-like
- Champion/challenger shadow testing with a blind judge
- Tooling — what your MCP servers cost in carried schema vs what they save
- Cache accounting, context-bloat detection, drift and behavioural control charts
- Cost by project/agent/model, plus notional subscription savings
 Audit log — every call, attested and policy-gated |
 Insights — what the gateway learned from your traffic |
 Head-to-head — models compared on the tasks you actually run |
 Model health — drift and behavioural control charts |
Requires Docker with Compose v2. Pull the published stack — no clone, no build:
curl -fsSL https://nautgate.dev/compose.yml -o docker-compose.yml
docker compose up -d
# NautGate mints a first-run API key on first boot — grab it from the log:
docker compose logs nautgate | grep -oE 'ng_[a-f0-9]{32}_[A-Za-z0-9_-]+' | head -1Grab it before recreating the container: the key is minted only when the
database has no keys yet, so docker compose logs on a rebuilt container will
not show it again, and minting a new one needs a key you already have. Locked
out? Set NAUTGATE_LOCAL_ADMIN_TOKEN in your .env and restart — the dashboard
then authenticates with it, and you can mint a fresh key from Settings → Keys.
Paste that key into the dashboard to activate it, then add your model-provider
keys in Settings → Providers (encrypted at rest — no .env or master key to
configure). Prefer files? Set OPENROUTER_API_KEY, ANTHROPIC_API_KEY, … in a
.env next to the compose instead. Building from source? See Development.
Update Docker: docker compose pull && docker compose up -d pulls the latest
image and recreates — your data (DB volume) is kept.
Homebrew installs the gateway without Docker. PostgreSQL is a dependency but its database needs to be created once:
brew install 48nauts-operator/tap/nautgate
brew services start postgresql@16
"$(brew --prefix postgresql@16)/bin/createdb" nautgate
brew services start nautgate
# Copy the first-run key printed on the initial start:
grep -oE 'ng_[a-f0-9]{32}_[A-Za-z0-9_-]+' \
"$(brew --prefix)/var/log/nautgate.log" | head -1Check it with nautgate status, then open
http://127.0.0.1:8090/dashboard. The service binds to loopback by default.
The formula installs the native NautGate core, not the NautRouter sidecar.
Direct provider and passthrough traffic works; model: auto and tier routing
need a separately running NautRouter. Use Docker above when you want the complete
stack with routing included.
Update Homebrew: brew update && brew upgrade nautgate.
Point a client at it:
# OpenAI-compatible
export OPENAI_BASE_URL=http://localhost:8090/v1
export OPENAI_API_KEY=ng_… # mint one in Settings → Keys
# Claude Code (--bare is required, or its stored OAuth login wins)
ANTHROPIC_BASE_URL=http://localhost:8090 ANTHROPIC_API_KEY=ng_… claude --bareDashboard: http://localhost:8090/dashboard
core/ FastAPI gateway (Python 3.12, uv)
vendor/ NautRouter — scoring + format translation (TypeScript)
deploy/ docker-compose stack
config/ routing + pricing tables
extensions/ optional capture / brain / privacy sidecars
scripts/ operational scripts
just test # pytest
just lint # ruff check
just fix # ruff check --fix && ruff format
just dev # uvicorn --reload
just up/down # docker composeActively developed and in daily use, but pre-1.0 — schema and endpoints can
still change between releases. Endpoints that aren't implemented yet return
501 with an X-Nautgate-Coming-In header rather than 404.
Issues and PRs welcome — see CONTRIBUTING.md. Start with
good first issue.
Found a security problem? Please don't open a public issue — see SECURITY.md.
Copyright © 2026 André Wolke, 48Nauts. NautGate is licensed under AGPL-3.0-or-later. Use, modify and self-host it freely. If you run a modified version as a network service, the AGPL requires you to offer its corresponding source to users of that service.
A separate commercial license is available for anyone who wants NautGate without AGPL obligations — hello@48nauts.com. Contributions are accepted under the terms in CONTRIBUTING.md, which is what makes that dual-licensing possible.