Yes, you can get better pricing if you do it yourself. But the true advantage of OpenRouter is that, in a space where there's a new model being released every week, you can easily switch to whatever model is best at any given time without having to set up accounts with multiple providers. Or you can just experiment with the latest release. Their product is the convenience. Of course if you decide to only use a specific provider or two, then you don't need OpenRouter.

But it's not really that difficult to make a clone of OpenRouter's service. What they do isn't really that original.

Their only value comes from the fact that the currently have lots of traffic. And I dkn't think that their cumstomers are really bound to theur servuce. They could switch to a competitor without too much hassle.