APIMart vs Selvedge

APIMart and Selvedge are both inference engines & infra tracked by AIDiveForge. Below is a side-by-side comparison of pricing, capabilities, platforms, and ownership — sourced from each tool's live website and verified before publishing.

APIMart

APIMart is a paid API gateway that routes requests to 500-plus models — including chat, image, video, and audio — through one OpenAI-compatible interface, with discounts the vendor states range from 30 to 70 percent off official provider pricing. You swap one base URL and keep your existing SDK. The catalog spans OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, ByteDance, Qwen, Kimi, and MiniMax, so switching between providers is a config change, not a refactor. The ceiling shows up when you need call-level control: APIMart is a passive gateway, not an orchestrator, so any branching logic, retries, or fallback chains live entirely in your own code. Teams building complex multi-step pipelines maintain that routing layer themselves.

Selvedge

Selvedge is a local MCP server that AI coding agents (Claude Code, Cursor, Copilot) call as they work, logging the reasoning behind every change into a SQLite file that lives next to your code under .selvedge/. Queries are entity-scoped — you ask about users.email or deps/stripe, not line numbers — so the answer surfaces in the same terms you search in. The vendor describes zero telemetry, no accounts, and no external servers; everything stays on disk. The wall appears when your team needs cross-repo provenance or wants to pipe this data into an existing observability stack — Selvedge emits records but does not integrate with those systems out of the box.

Attribute	APIMart	Selvedge
Pricing	Paid	Free
Free trial	No	No
Open source	No	Yes
Has API	Yes	No
Self-hosted option	No	Yes
Platforms	Cloud-based API service	Linux, macOS, Windows (via Python)
Released	—	2026-05
Pros	OpenAI-compatible API surface, which means your existing SDK code reaches the full 500-plus model catalog by changing one base URL — no per-provider SDK migrations when you add a new model. Per-model discount pricing displayed transparently in the marketplace, so you can calculate actual cost before committing to a model in production rather than discovering the bill after a spike. Single API key covers chat, image, video, and audio providers, which means you stop maintaining separate credentials and billing accounts for each vendor and reduce the blast radius when a key rotates. The docs provide an llms.txt prompt so AI coding agents like Cursor or Claude can instantly understand the full APIMart endpoint catalog, cutting integration time from hours to minutes for developers using AI-assisted workflows. Usage-based billing where you pay only for successful requests, so failed or errored calls do not consume budget — a material difference when you are stress-testing a new model with high failure rates.	Reasoning is captured in the same context window that produced the change — not reconstructed from the diff afterward — which means the intent survives even when the original prompt, the developer who wrote it, and the model version are all gone. Entity-scoped queries (selvedge blame payments.amount, selvedge diff users --since 30d) let you ask about the things you actually search for rather than hunting through line-level history, so a schema audit that would take an afternoon takes a single command. Fully local storage in a SQLite file with no accounts, no telemetry, and no external servers, which means sensitive schema and API change history never leaves the machine — a hard requirement in compliance-heavy environments. Provider-agnostic MCP integration wires into Claude Code, Cursor, and Copilot through a single setup command, so teams already using any of those agents get provenance logging without changing their workflow. Full-text search across all logged events (selvedge search "stripe") and changeset grouping (selvedge changeset add-stripe-billing) mean you can reconstruct the full scope of a feature build after the fact, which is the audit trail that git log alone cannot provide.
Cons	APIMart is a passive relay: it does not retry failed requests, fall back to an alternative model when a provider returns an error, or route based on latency or cost thresholds. Teams that need gateway-level resilience write and maintain that logic themselves — at which point they are running two systems. No self-hosted deployment option exists. Teams operating under data-residency or compliance requirements that prohibit third-party intermediaries handling request payloads cannot use APIMart at all and switch to a self-hostable alternative like LiteLLM. The discount model is a paid-only service with no documented free tier. Prototyping before committing budget requires a sign-up and funding the account, which adds friction for early-stage evaluation compared to providers offering free trial credits.	Selvedge has no API and no export integration — teams that need to push reasoning records into an existing compliance platform, a data warehouse, or a centralized observability system must write their own pipeline against the SQLite file, adding a maintenance surface that grows with audit requirements. The store is scoped to a single local project directory; teams running multi-repo codebases where an agent change in one repo depends on a change in another get no cross-repo provenance, and at that point teams managing compliance across repositories will move to a dedicated audit-log solution that operates at the organization level. Selvedge only captures what the agent explicitly logs through the MCP tool call — if an agent skips the log_change call, makes changes outside a supported tool, or the MCP connection drops mid-session, that change has no recorded reasoning and the gap is invisible in the history.

Bottom line

APIMart is paid while Selvedge is free; Selvedge is open source; only APIMart exposes a public API. Choose based on which difference matters most for your workflow.

Frequently asked questions

What is the difference between APIMart and Selvedge?

APIMart is Paid, while Selvedge is Free and open source. Compare pricing, free trial, API, platforms, and pros/cons in the table above on AIDiveForge.

Is APIMart better than Selvedge?

It depends on your workflow. Use the side-by-side attributes (pricing, open source, API, self-hosted, platforms) to decide. AIDiveForge does not rank a universal winner — we publish verified facts so you can choose.