When to Run Your Own Gateway

A decision guide for developers considering self-hosting a Livepeer gateway – covering the trade-offs between hosted APIs and self-hosted infrastructure, and what self-hosting requires.

A Gateway is the node that routes your AI inference requests to Orchestrators on the Livepeer Network. By default, you access a Gateway hosted by Livepeer Studio or a community provider. When you run your own, you control the Orchestrator selection, the auth model, and the cost structure.

This page helps you decide whether self-hosting is the right move for where you are now.

When to run your own Gateway

If you need…	Self-hosted Gateway	Hosted API (Studio / community)
Get started fast	No – setup adds overhead	Yes – API key and go
Cost savings at scale	Yes – direct Orchestrator settlement, no hosted-API markup	No – hosted provider margin on top of network price
Custom Orchestrator selection	Yes – pass any -orchAddr list or custom discovery endpoint	No – provider controls routing
Data stays within your infrastructure	Yes – Gateway runs on your servers; requests never leave your stack	No – requests route through provider
Production resilience / redundancy	Yes – run multiple Gateways, control failover logic	Partial – depends on provider SLAs
Custom auth or billing model	Yes – integrate your own user management, remote signer, JWT layer	No – provider auth model only
Zero infrastructure overhead	No – you own the binary and the machine	Yes – nothing to run

The natural path for most developers is: start with the hosted API, build and validate your application, then self-host as usage grows and the cost or control trade-offs become worth the overhead.

The Nov 2025 Network Vision blog described this arc directly:

“Similarly to how startups start to build on platforms like Heroku, Netlify, or Vercel, and then as they scale and need more control and cost savings they build direct on AWS, and then ultimately move to their own datacenters after reaching even more scale – users of Daydream or a real-time Agent platform built on Livepeer, may ultimately choose to run their own Gateway.”

There is no hard threshold at which you must switch. The signals are: your monthly API spend is material, you want to specify which Orchestrators handle your jobs, or you need the inference path to stay within your own infrastructure.

What self-hosting requires

This is not a setup guide – for that, go to the Gateways tab. This is a realistic checklist of what you are signing up for before you commit.

Windows and macOS binaries for the AI Gateway are not currently available. Running a self-hosted AI Gateway requires Linux or Docker.

Requirement	AI Gateway (off-chain)	Video Gateway (on-chain)
Operating system	Linux (or Docker on any host)	Linux
ETH / on-chain account	Not required	Required – ETH account + Arbitrum RPC URL
Staking / LPT	Not required	Not required (for Gateway role)
go-livepeer binary	Required – Linux binary or livepeer/go-livepeer:master Docker image	Required – same binary
Orchestrator list	Required – at least one -orchAddr endpoint to route to	Required – network discovery via on-chain signalling
Open port	Port 8937 (default) accessible from your app	Port 8937 (default)
Time to first request	~15 minutes with Docker; longer for binary + config	Longer – requires ETH account setup and on-chain registration

The AI Gateway path is designed for developers, not infrastructure operators. A single Docker command launches a functional Gateway. The on-chain video Gateway path is more involved and is primarily relevant to operators running the full Livepeer transcoding node.

The two Gateway types

Type	Use for	On-chain?	ETH required?	Where to start
AI Gateway (off-chain)	AI inference – text-to-image, LLM, ComfyStream, BYOC	No	No	Set up an AI Gateway
Video Gateway (on-chain broadcaster)	Video transcoding, HLS delivery	Yes	Yes	Set up a Video Gateway

The public Gateway at dream-gateway.livepeer.cloud and the Livepeer Studio AI API are both off-chain AI Gateway implementations of the same go-livepeer binary. When you self-host, you run that same binary yourself.

Next steps

Set Up a Gateway

Full setup guide for self-hosted AI and video Gateways in the Gateways tab.

Back to the AI API

Not ready to self-host yet. Return to the hosted API quickstart.

What is a Gateway?

Understand how Gateways work before deciding whether to run one.