That looks absolutely horrifying. What are the alternatives ??
Vercel AI Gateway is one I've used: https://vercel.com/ai-gateway/models
Vercel AI Gateway also route to other providers, so the same issues can occur there as well.
So you want to use OpenRouter?
21–30 of 208 posts
Re: So you want to use OpenRouter?
#22I never tested this but always suspected it. When I learned that providers differentiate themselves on how they optimize and host the model (otherwise, why would you choose one over another?), I figured some were less "give me the best possible experience" than others.
Re: So you want to use OpenRouter?
#23I noticed some strange behavior when I was setting it up to avoid providers that collect data, hence blocking default providers. Definitely it is worth filtering well tested providers, which is a feature OpenRouter provides.
The article that I read addressed this point specifically. "Trusted" providers do not maintain consistent performance, and do not have the same performance across different models.
Re: So you want to use OpenRouter?
#24great post, I just put $100 in credits on open router to try different models, I think maybe using the "real" provider is the way forward once I've spent my credits and decided which one I want (for now).
Be sure to spend them! Another great feature of OpenRouter is that they will take your credits after a year. They just delete them. A ToS-legalized theft if you ask me. (Even if you are still actively using those credits.)
Re: So you want to use OpenRouter?
#25As 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.
The article mentioned they pinned the provider and model and the result was bad as well with their own shenanigans. That part was in the end of the article so maybe you missed it.
Re: So you want to use OpenRouter?
#26That looks absolutely horrifying. What are the alternatives ??
There are none, this isn't a problem specific to OR as much as it is a problem with serving LLMs in general.
If you use any other meta-provider that routes your requests to third party providers, you'll likely face the same issues. If you try using any of those providers directly, you'll likely face some of the same issues as well, except you won't have the option of quickly swapping to a different one and taking your credits with you.
Extreme variance in quality and feature support per provider is probably the biggest obstacle holding back adoption of open weights models.
Re: So you want to use OpenRouter?
#27That looks absolutely horrifying. What are the alternatives ??
Just use a single vendor. Literally nothing wrong with that, and you avoid the complexity of both n-1 of the vendors (leaving you with the highest quality vendor) as well as the issues with the aggregating layer.
Not sure why people are drawn to this particular blunder. The promise of vendor neutrality maybe? I'll take working product over vendor-neutral slop anyways.
Re: So you want to use OpenRouter?
#28That looks absolutely horrifying. What are the alternatives ??
If you only care about open source models, cline and opencode provide usage based access and subscriptions for general API access
Re: So you want to use OpenRouter?
#29I use Fireworks for a production app. Much lower volumes though. My only gripe is their serverless offering for reranking has only 1 model which is Qwen 8b and it's quite expensive.
Re: So you want to use OpenRouter?
#30This 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 “Ope…
> to the point I wonder if I should just use the providers directly.
How many account credentials, balances, and tokens do you want to maintain? Even without automatic failover services such as openrouter are still incredibly useful.
Personally I pin a single vetted provider in the interest of minimizing risk.