What does openrouter actually do though? They buy a bunch of tokens from token providers and allow you to easily route queries between token processors?

This seems like the kind of thing that you can have Claude write in an afternoon for whatever service you're running. I don't see the value.

people are lazy

people don't want to maintain infra (ie adding new models all the time)

people want their queries to work without thinking

if a provider goes down, openrouter queries dont (ideally)

it's really not that complex to understand