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So you want to use OpenRouter?

mmoustafa.com

11–20 of 208 posts

Re: So you want to use OpenRouter?

#11
post #5

That looks absolutely horrifying. What are the alternatives ??

I've had opencode go + opencode work reliably, though I'm skeptical of how robust their data security claims are in practice because they suddenly blocked accessing Deepseek unless you were okay with the data going to China where true data privacy for something like that is illegal, which makes me wonder where it went before, which weakens my trust. It's also a lot less useful now that Deepseek is so much more expensive.

Re: So you want to use OpenRouter?

#13
could not agree more one pet peeve of mine is that using strict json output also does not work on all the endpoints of the models so I have to go through them one by one try it out and then only whitelist them.

Re: So you want to use OpenRouter?

#14
Wow, that explains a lot. I was using OpenClaw with open router, but stopped because how inconsistent the results were over the same prompt. I thought OC is at fault, never would have guessed that there are differences between providers.

Re: So you want to use OpenRouter?

#15
Another thing to be aware of -- apparently their billing limits don't work. Somehow someone was able to use my key from Singapore. It had a $10 daily limit and they were able to spend $100. Not only that, it got me blocked from all models for the frontier labs.

On top of that, near as I can tell, there are no protections for your API key. No restrictions by country, IP, etc...

Re: So you want to use OpenRouter?

#16
post #14

Wow, that explains a lot. I was using OpenClaw with open router, but stopped because how inconsistent the results were over the same prompt. I thought OC is at fault, never would have guessed that there are differences between providers.

The way that OpenRouter frames it with having calls routed to whatever provider is handy encourages you to think that they’re all the same in basic functionality. Really sours me on OpenRouter.

Re: So you want to use OpenRouter?

#18
As expected vibecoding bros cannot even read the manual properly.

It is pretty trivial to pin a single provider for a model. Better yet, instead of calling the model directly, use presets instead. You can easily change the setting on openrouter without having to update your app every time.

Re: So you want to use OpenRouter?

#20
This squares with my, much much, smaller OpenRouter usage. It’s just incredibly unreliable and you are forced to pin providers and even then it can be a crapshoot as the author found.

OpenRouter sells the idea of swapping being commodity providers but it couldn’t be further from the truth. Provider A is often not swappable for B or C (again, as this author found). It can be crazy-making as you sit there thinking “OpenRouter has no clothes right?! Am I the one that’s wrong?”.

I love the _idea_ of OpenRouter and maybe Stripe can improve this situation but the only sane way I’ve found to use it is to tightly pin providers to the point I wonder if I should just use the providers directly.

Without pinning you are in for a world of hurt and unreliability (varying model capabilities, speed, etc).

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