Openrouter is roughly at that level of value-add. With plenty of competition now, since being able to charge 5% on your AI spend just for having sane billing, spending controls (actually enforced per-api-token budget limits!) and easy sign-up is an insanely profitable business proposition

On the other hand I think it's fair to criticize the model hosts for not offering the same

(I work at OpenRouter) Certainly for individual developers / hobby projects that's the primary value prop; super easy access to all of the models.

But there's a lot more functionality that becomes relevant when building in production. We do automatic fallbacks, route between providers based on data policies, syndicate your data to agent observability tools / your logging platform of choice, user-level and api-key-level budget management and model allow/block lists, programmatic API key management, etc, etc. More good stuff shipping all the time!