Q1 2026 Latency Benchmarks: Autark vs. Direct API

One of the most common objections we hear: "Won't adding a proxy layer slow down my API calls?" It's a reasonable concern. Here are the numbers.

Methodology

We ran 50,000 real-world API calls through three configurations:

1. Direct — Application → Model Provider
2. Competitor Proxy — Application → Cloud Proxy → Model Provider → Cloud Proxy → Application
3. Autark Inline — Application → Autark (local) → Model Provider → Autark → Application

All tests used production workloads from three different enterprise customers, with payloads ranging from 1K to 200K tokens.

Results

| Metric | Direct API | Competitor Proxy | Autark Inline | |--------|-----------|-----------------|---------------| | Median TTFT | 284ms | 738ms | 271ms | | P95 TTFT | 1,420ms | 2,890ms | 1,380ms | | Processing overhead | 0ms | ~450ms | ~12ms | | Net latency impact | baseline | +454ms | -13ms |

Autark is 13ms faster on median than direct API calls. This is because the 12ms processing overhead is more than offset by sending a 58% smaller payload over the wire.

Why Competitors Are Slower

Cloud-based proxy solutions add two extra network hops — your data goes to their servers first, then to the model provider, then back through their servers, then to you. Each hop adds 100-200ms of latency.

Autark runs inline within your infrastructure. One network hop. Sub-12ms processing. Net negative latency impact.