Great product, been using it for a while.

Turns out even a proxy can be worth $8bn with the right business model behind it.

Users get an array of providers competing behind a single API, meaning they have to compete on price and quality not vendor lock-in. This encourages users to join OpenRouter over specific model vendors.

Providers get easy access to revenue (and data) and new customers with little to no ad spending, encouraging them onto the platform too.

And that's all you need. Win win.

Well done and congratulations.

I've been using OpenRouter since relatively early (I build evvl.ai - an eval platform on top of it) and think that they're selling at a good time.

An underpinning of their model is that API calls / inference are similar across providers allowing for commodity tokenization cost comparisons, but the providers are beginning to shift to non commodity features that don't easily shift.

For instance, calling Gemini with "search grounding" isn't something that OpenRouter can do (they sub their own web search in), last I checked they weren't doing real time voice models, etc.