If you disable all other providers but DeepSeek in your OpenRouter guardrails, is that effectively the same thing?

Sure but you still pay only OpenRouter :)

Interestingly, OpenRouter will serve inference at cost for a lot of models.

No? They charge 5.5% (I believe) on every top-up. Which is the equivalent of charging you 5.5% on every request.

	▲	faitswulff 12 hours ago \| parent [-]
		Ah, so that's where the profit comes from. Very payment-processor like move, makes sense that Stripe picked them up.