To me it doesn't sound so "economically convenient" to pay extra usage to alternative providers while someone pays 20/100/200 dollars for their service.

The subs for those alternative providers have similar tiering but more generous token allocations than Anthropic and OpenAI, and deliver good enough quality to be worth it.

If I needed to fall back on OpenRouter, it'd be paid per token, of course, but that'd take 4 major providers being down, in which case I suspect I'll have more critical things to worry about.

As it is, I use more than I could with a single $200 Claude Max subscription anyway, so I distribute my tasks across multiple providers.

Even without that it's cheap insurance given the cost of lost time.