They are the leading LLM API routing tool. Stripe is the leading payments API. They are betting on OpenRouter being as important to developers as payments. Both let them take a small percentage of a shitload of transactions. Being the goto service for APIs and executing well is the moat. Someone else would have to beat the volume leader on price or beat them on execution. Good luck. The only realistic competitors would be Amazon, Google or Microsoft and none have shown any interest so far.

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roncesvalles 3 hours ago | parent [-]

I don't understand why one would let a router handle their LLM request (other than for routing it to the cheapest inference provider for open models).

When I build an application that uses LLMs, it's tuned and tested for a specific model only. LLMs are not really drop-in replacements of each other, even different versions of the same series.

The pertinent question isn't why OpenRouter but why a router company is worth 7B.

	▲	jm4 3 hours ago \| parent [-]
		You can use one key for multiple models, you can have many keys with a budget on each, you can manage all your keys in one piece of glass, you don't have to deal with the upstream vendors directly just to name a few. These are all things that may be important to developers. I can't even get an OpenAI API key because those morons can't get their phone verification to work properly. OpenRouter is the only way I can use their models.