I was looking at OpenRouter earlier today, after becoming frustrated with VertexAI. Similar in that they offer a menu of many models, different in that Google is running them and OpenRouter is a proxy.

If OpenRouter is not much more than a middle man, what business model are they raising money on? Surveillance?

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dchest 20 hours ago | parent | next [-]

They are a marketplace for model providers, which is quite a nice business model.

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verdverm 19 hours ago | parent [-]

Being the middleman is always nice until the need is obviated. My understanding is that this is largely used to cycle through free usage tiers without getting rate-limited. Anonymous Credentials is designed to end that.

What makes this preferable to a self hosted or framework built-in version?

https://blog.dock.io/anonymous-credentials/

	▲	hu3 15 hours ago \| parent [-]
		Convenience. They sell very convenient shovels in a goldrush.

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polski-g 16 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

They reduce friction to using different models and providers.

Don't want to spend 4 hours getting an API key to use Google AI? Use openrouter

Don't trust Chinese providers with your data? Use Openrouter and blacklist non-US inference providers.