As someone who uses OpenRouter extensively (and wrote an unintentional adjacent PR piece a few days ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48317294 ), it's definitely the best way to try out new models without fiddling with each providers distinct APIs which is becoming a recurring concern as of late.

That said, I don't understand the people who use something a full agentic backbone with expensive models like Claude Opus with OpenRouter because that 5% surcharge is meaningful at that level of cost instead of going with the source API providers. But people are clearly doing it, and it's pure revenue.

IDK, but that sounds like something that would be better implemented with an open-source library to which providers supply support patches. Why do I need a company to act as a proxy and not just run a relatively simple shim layer on my machine?

I'm just a stupid systems programmer working in the bowels of AI and I understand there is a lot of seemingly pointless software which exists solely to provide a slight boost to convenience in exchange for money. Is OpenRouter just that? Do they actually host models themselves or centralize billing amongst various providers?

There is a lot of dumb token spend right now - tokenmaxing and such. Economic cost of token is not being evaluated carefully because there is fomo and no one wants to be left behind. But folks are waking up to it, and dumb token spending is not sustainable and will revert.

Better uptime? Given it will be routed to one of Anthropic, Amazon Bedrock, Claude Platform on AWS, Google Vertex (Europe) or Google Vertex

Convenience has a markup

>> it's definitely the best way to try out new models without fiddling with each providers distinct APIs which is becoming a recurring concern as of late

Why not... Cursor?

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