So you want to use OpenRouter?

I do use OpenRouter for my personal use and this matches with my experience. I still use it because of it's top up model providing a way to not get surprised by out of control costs and being able to switch models with one account, but it's very noticeable at times.

The models I've mainly been using recently are GLM 5.3 Flash and GLM 5.3. While obviously all these models have some variability, GLM 5.3 Flash feels like it oscillates between "I can't believe it's not Sonnet", but it costs a fraction of that and "This feels like I'm back using GPT-4, why am I even bothering with an LLM?".

> just incredibly unreliable and you are forced to pin providers and even then it can be a crapshoot as the author found.

But that's the intention right? Even the name implies they just send stuff around for you, and if you want to control the routing, you'd lock down providers. I don't see how they could build what they wanted to build, and not have it end up unreliable if you freely round-robin between providers, it's bound to work exactly like this.

> 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.

This is quite literally the point of OpenRouter. A unified interface, so you can easily switch providers without changing a ton of code which using providers directly would most likely mean, as there are slight differences between them. And the providers all run different weights, so of course quality/performance will differ among them.

I guess OpenRouter is a bit like Amazon, in that they're just routing stuff around for you, but to actually find the good and usable stuff, you need to focus in on what providers/manufacturers you know are good, and stick with those. Still, the unified interface helps you to shop around and try different ones when you want to.

Wait WTF?! I thought performance was, well, performance, not efficacy! OpenRouter's UI in this section is remarkably broken and unclear at the same time, and I have no idea where the author got those clean charts. "AutoExacto" numbers (completely meaningless name) are available for 6 providers, two of which are the same provider, and none of which are even in the top half throughput-wise. When you click "+28 more providers", it just shows a clearly broken modal. And the the next two graphs are even worse. Really all of these graphs are pretty and completely 100% useless.

I feel like it's absolutely insane that some providers serve the same model with much less efficacy. That doesn't make sense to me. What's going on?! I'm suddenly feeling intense shame for having routed all my non-subscription usage through them so far, and honestly some white hot anger that they would blatantly lie about something so important.

What am I missing? Is this really true?

> The same model will benchmark very differently

Providers probably serve quantized versions without disclosing it. Which is a real shame, because for certain tasks I would be perfectly willing to trade accuracy for cost. But, unfortunately, it is impossible to explicitly choose how quantized do you want your model to be, unless you are running it yourself on your own (or rented) hardware.

BTW, does anyone knows if LLM Gateway suffers from the same issues? Currently looking at trying it, but haven't got to it yet.

I've used Requesty (https://www.requesty.ai), let's you pin down providers and build your own routing policy so you at least somewhat know what to expect.