Under what circumstances would one pay a 5.5% premium so that an EU-built (but not EU hosted) routing layer could proxy to US/chinese model providers?

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johndough an hour ago | parent | next [-]

OpenAI and Anthropic steal my money by expiring unused API credits, which is illegal in my country. OpenRouter also has a clause to do that in their terms of service (although they haven't yet, and some employee on their discord assured me they won't). Not sure about Eden AI (they have some fishy stuff in their ToS like "Unless otherwise stated, payments are non-refundable"), but at least I could sue them without buying an international plane ticket if the need arises.

But the most important advantage is the convenience of being able to try out new models without subscribing to yet another service.

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alexmercerdev 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Practically, I think the premium only makes sense if the routing layer gives you something operational: one contract/invoice, EU support/legal process, spend caps, audit logs, maybe provider fallback. If it's just a pass-through to the same US/China model endpoints with +5.5%, I don't see much reason for devs to switch on price or sovereignty grounds.

	▲	vidarh 2 hours ago \| parent [-]
		I haven't looked at whether Eden does this, but Openrouter provides a number of these, and more. I go direct to the major providers, and use OpenRouter for the smaller ones because it saves me a lot of hassle. If Eden provides a similar feature set, I'd certainly consider them.

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stingraycharles 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

In a world where it enables you to tell your place of a work “just get us an account there so we have access to all models under a single billing account”.

In other words, it solves an organizational problem, not a technical one. That’s what the 5.5% is for.

Whether or not you prefer this or OpenRouter or one of the other LLM gateways is another discussion.

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embedding-shape 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Under the circumstance where I'm looking for a "AI Gateway" (not sure why I would, but lets say) and at the same time I prefer to use EU businesses because it tends to be easier and more familiar.

What happens after the AI Gateway don't matter that much, since the whole purpose of the product seems to be about routing LLM inference requests, if it didn't do that, I don't think they'll have anything to sell in the first place :)

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rolandm 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

But OpenRouter also costs 5.5%: https://openrouter.ai/pricing

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raincole 2 hours ago | parent [-]

And? The point is that it's routed to the same model. Is the middleman's nationality that important, especially when you already accept the existence of a middleman?

	▲	embedding-shape 2 hours ago \| parent \| next [-]
		If you're an EU business it's easier to do B2B with other EU businesses, just like it's easier for US businesses to do B2B with other US businesses. Not sure this is strange or out of the ordinary, I think it works the same in most places in the world today.
	▲	muzzy19 an hour ago \| parent \| prev \| next [-]
		> Is the middleman's nationality that important Yes, that's why I switched
	▲	vidarh 2 hours ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		So important that you'd switch to another middleman at no additional cost over the middleman you're already using? Probably for quite a few people.

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muzzy19 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Choice of models, including fully european, and the pay-as-you-go plan.