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So you want to use OpenRouter?

mmoustafa.com

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Re: So you want to use OpenRouter?

#71

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...

We do now indeed have IP restrictions for API keys

Re: So you want to use OpenRouter?

#72
This is very useful information and comes at a perfect time! I use Openrouter for my newly released running tracker (I use it for live coaching and post-run debriefs). I've benchmarked a bunch of models over time to evaluate their aptitude for this specific task, and have noticed that sometimes a model can underperform for seemingly no reason. I'll be sure to include model providers in my benchmarking suite going forward!

Re: So you want to use OpenRouter?

#75
post #72

This is very useful information and comes at a perfect time! I use Openrouter for my newly released running tracker (I use it for live coaching and post-run debriefs). I've benchmarked a bunch of models over time to evaluate their aptitude for this specific task, and have noticed that sometimes a model can underperform for seemingly no reason. I'll be sure to include model providers in my benchmarking suite going for…

Whats the tracker called? I'd like to try it.

Re: So you want to use OpenRouter?

#76
post #72

This is very useful information and comes at a perfect time! I use Openrouter for my newly released running tracker (I use it for live coaching and post-run debriefs). I've benchmarked a bunch of models over time to evaluate their aptitude for this specific task, and have noticed that sometimes a model can underperform for seemingly no reason. I'll be sure to include model providers in my benchmarking suite going for…

Whats the tracker called? I'd like to try it.

It's in the parents profile

Android app called "AudioRun"

https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.audiorun.a...

https://apkpure.com/audiorun/com.audiorun.app

Re: So you want to use OpenRouter?

#77
Under privacy, ignored, I put providers that always suck. Digital Ocean, OpenInference, DeepInfra, AtlasCloud, and Alibaba (that one is different, it doesn’t suck in the same way as the others with a dumb model, but instead it’s heavily censored and doesn’t like being used as RP model in Skyrim).

Re: So you want to use OpenRouter?

#78
post #5

That looks absolutely horrifying. What are the alternatives ??

Fireworks hosts the available models themselves which probably solves the problem consistency problem that OP had to deal with.

It's been a few months since I looked around at this topic, but Fireworks and Openrouter were the two options I (briefly) tried.

Re: So you want to use OpenRouter?

#79
Co-founder and COO of OpenRouter here.

Thanks everyone for the feedback here. Some of this we are aware of, some of it we aren't. Some we can fix, some of it is inherent to inference (and we in fact improve the situation dramatically).

Philosophically, at OpenRouter we are trying to do two different things, that are sometimes at odds with one another:

1. Let you use a lot of capacity across a lot of providers, in a way that "just works" and you don't need to worry about it.

2. Have a huge variety of inference available so you can pick radically different price/performance tradeoffs, data policy decisions, geographic destinations, inventive hardware, etc.

These are inherently odd bedfellows, and we are still very much improving how we can make both of them true at the same time.

Some quick thoughts on the article itself:

1. Benchmarks: YES! Providers benchmark differently. We run benchmarks on the live endpoints continuously, monitor the median performance, and kick providers out of the default routing pool if they vary by more than a standard deviation. We work hard (and continue to invest) to make sure that providers serving sub-par inference can't game the system, and that our routing actively avoids them. So the chart is accurate (it's our chart) and it actively influences our routing decisions!

2. That is bad and we will fix it. Sorry.

3. When we on-board providers we run essentially the same test as the author did to verify that the param is working as expected. If it isn't, we don't launch the provider. However this is not one we are running constantly in production. We are working on making this more robust in general and I do believe is fundamentally solvable in a way where it will "just work".

4. We 100% agree that users should not filter by quantization. It's a bit of a legacy concept in general; there is a huge amount of code between "model weights" and "inference API" and in almost all cases quality degrades in that part of the stack, NOT in the model weights themselves.

5. Hmm...we will dig in here. We monitor tool calls in real time and route around providers that are regularly mis-parsing tool calls. So you should get a very low rate of these in general. Another area we have invested a lot in: https://openrouter.ai/docs/guides/routing/auto-exacto

6. We will dig in here as well. I'm surprised this is happening frequently enough to be noticeable. We eat the cost when the finish reason is an error, but not when it is "stop". Perhaps we can expand our "insurance" program: https://openrouter.ai/docs/guides/features/zero-completion-i...

7. Will investigate.

8. We attempt to heal these, but obviously missed some. Will fix.

9. We do not rate limit by IP. Would love some more information here, as that is very surprising.

10. Ugh. That sucks. I'm sorry. We are introducing QoS tiers for production apps, which will address a lot of this.

Re: So you want to use OpenRouter?

#80
post #5

That looks absolutely horrifying. What are the alternatives ??

I was looking for an LLM gateway and saw that the most popular one had just had a massive supply chain attack, so I wrote my own. Took about 2 weeks and initially I wrote it as a provider for pi coding agent. I connect to moonshot, qwen, Gemini, zhipu, anthropic, deepseek and OpenAI. I use models.dev to load model and pricing info. Adding new providers is pretty easy because I have a standard internal format and each provider has an adapter that translates between my standard format and that required by the provider.
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