Vidai Community Edition is here, Vidai

The Community Edition of Vidai is now available. It is the same Rust binary that runs in regulated production deployments today: the same gateway, the same cost engine, the same in-path policy and audit. Free for personal, evaluation and non-commercial use, no expiry and its available at Vidai Community.

This is a short post about who it is for, what it does, and what we deliberately kept out.

Who Community is for

Three audiences had been asking for the same thing in different language. A developer who wants to put one boundary in front of OpenAI, Anthropic and Google in their own infrastructure and have a real dashboard. A platform engineer who is tired of stitching translation, routing, guardrails, cost and fallback together as a chain of libraries. An evaluator inside a larger organisation who needs to test a full control plane in a sandbox before any procurement conversation starts.

All three hit the same wall. To evaluate the architecture they wanted, they first had to sign a paid contract. Community removes that step: the full product runs on their own data, on their own infrastructure, before any commercial conversation starts.

What you get

Community is the production gateway, not a stripped trial. The same binary, the same hot path. Specifically:

One-line integration. For most applications it really is a one-line change: point your existing SDK at the Vidai base URL, keep your API key as-is, ship. The OpenAI, Anthropic and Google GenAI SDKs work against any upstream because Vidai does bidirectional native translation in the proxy path. Call with the Anthropic SDK, route to OpenAI, the response comes back in Anthropic shape. Native in, native out, no rewrite.
In-path cost attribution. Every request priced and tagged to the user, key, team, application and model that spent it, the moment it returns.
Per-team budgets and spend circuits. Hard caps that stop the next call when a budget is breached, not alerts about the call that already ran.
Regex guardrails and routing rules. Block, mask, redirect or log-only, applied inline.
Teams, applications, API key issuance, rate limits. The everyday operational surface.
Public rate-card server, free. Best-effort SLA, refreshed on a standard cadence. Credentials are issued alongside your licence.

It runs anywhere with a CPU. Your VPC, on-prem, a laptop for evaluation, a Raspberry Pi if you really want to. 25 MB in the hot path. No phone-home. No data leaves your network for any routing or policy decision to be made.

The efficiency is the part that surprises people. On a single legacy 8-core node, with cost, policy and audit active on every call, Vidai holds 1.95 ms median latency and roughly 12 ms p95 under sustained production load. The Python alternatives we benchmarked against, running in pass-through mode without the governance work, take seconds at p95 under the same load. The full numbers and methodology are in the engineering write-up.

What we kept out, on purpose

Community is complete for its persona. It is not a starter kit you graduate from. The paid tiers exist for organisations with different obligations, not for engineers who want more features.

The full audit-grade ledger, point-in-time rate-card replay, compliance-led routing, BI tables and HMAC-signed webhooks live at the Scale tier. They are the things a regulated organisation needs the moment a compliance officer or an auditor asks what the AI traffic did, or when a CFO needs spend attribution across teams that survives a contract review. They are also the things that take real engineering work to support, which is why they sit behind a paid licence.

ML guardrails (prompt-injection, toxicity and PII detection with bring-your-own-model support), your own rate-card server, enterprise identity via SSO and LDAP, priority support and SLA live at the Enterprise tier. They are the things a CISO needs a contract behind when Vidai is in the critical path.

How to start

Two steps. Sign in at portal.vidai.uk and generate your licence. Download the latest release tarball from github.com/vidaiUK/vidai-quickstart, verify the cosign signature, drop the licence file in, run setup. The dashboard comes up on http://localhost.

The full walkthrough is on the Community page, and the operational reference is at docs.vidai.uk.

One ask, one offer

If you run a regulated or high-throughput AI deployment and the gateway you have today is not answering the cost or compliance questions, talk to us. We are running a small number of pilots ahead of the next release and the conversations from those have shaped the product more than anything else. I will be at NY Tech Week this week and would happily meet over a coffee if you are around.

And if you spin up Community, find the rough edges, hate one of the defaults, or wish a flag did something different: open an issue on the quickstart repo. The product gets sharper every time someone runs it on hardware that is not ours.