Replacing 150 LLM Tools with One Binary
I spent a week cataloging every LLM middleware tool I could find. Proxies, gateways, observability platforms, prompt managers, guardrail libraries, caching layers, cost trackers, workflow engines. I found 134 distinct tools.
Most of them do one thing well. But if you want cost caps and caching and observability and safety guardrails and prompt versioning? You’re stitching together 5 different tools from 5 different vendors with 5 different APIs, 5 different dashboards, and 5 different pricing models.
The fragmentation tax
Here’s what a typical production LLM stack looks like today:
- Proxy: LiteLLM or Portkey (+ Redis + Postgres)
- Observability: Helicone or Langfuse
- Safety: Guardrails AI or NeMo Guardrails
- Prompt management: PromptLayer or custom
- Cost tracking: Helicone or custom dashboards
- Caching: GPTCache or custom Redis layer
- Workflows: LangChain or custom orchestration
That’s 7+ tools, each with its own deployment requirements, authentication, data stores, and failure modes. Your LLM request now flows through a Rube Goldberg machine of middleware before it reaches the provider.
What consolidation looks like
Stockyard replaces this entire stack with a single curl:
curl -fsSL stockyard.dev/install.sh | sh stockyard
One process. One port. One database. 76 middleware modules covering routing, caching, cost control, safety, transforms, validation, observability, and provider shims. Plus six core apps (Lookout, Brand, Tack Room, Forge, Trading Post, and more) that would each be a separate product in the current ecosystem.
The integration advantage
When everything runs in the same process, data flows for free:
- The proxy writes every request to Lookout automatically. No SDK integration, no webhook setup.
- Every Lookout trace gets a corresponding Brand audit ledger entry. The hash chain is maintained in real-time.
- Tack Room experiments run through the proxy, so they automatically get cost tracking, caching, and safety guardrails.
- Forge workflows call the proxy for LLM steps, inheriting all 76 middleware modules.
- Trading Post packs can configure modules, providers, alerts, policies, and workflows in one atomic install.
Try getting that level of integration across 7 separate tools.
What we’re not
Stockyard isn’t a framework. It doesn’t touch your application code. It’s infrastructure — a proxy that sits between your app and LLM providers. Your app talks to Stockyard the same way it talks to OpenAI: standard /v1/chat/completions API. If you only need routing, proxy-only mode gives you just that layer.
We don’t believe the answer to LLM infrastructure fragmentation is “build a framework that wraps everything.” The answer is a proxy that handles everything transparently.