> It’s unclear to me what the advantages of openrouter are but it seems to be a default I see many people talking about here.

The advantage of OpenRouter compared to using API providers directly is that you can switch between API providers without binding your money to a single provider.

The advantage of OpenRouter compared to OpenCode Go is that the price for DeepSeek-V4-Pro and MiMo-V2.5-Pro is better on OpenRouter.

For example, DeepSeek costs $0.435/0.87/0.003625 for 1M in/out/cached tokens (https://openrouter.ai/deepseek/deepseek-v4-pro), compared to an equivalent of $1.74/3.48/0.0145 under the OpenCode Go plan (https://opencode.ai/docs/go/#usage-limits), almost exactly 4x.

But since you get a monthly usage limit of $60 with the OpenCode Go plan for $10 (i.e. 6x), you might still come out ahead if you use it a lot (or use other models, where the pricing difference is smaller or non-existent).