This is super insightful
So you want to use OpenRouter?
131–140 of 208 posts
Re: So you want to use OpenRouter?
#132We're very happy with OpenRouter in production, although we use it in a pretty limited fashion. We have only ~10 providers allowlisted (based on their location and ZDR policies) and we use only a few models, often frontier models. Has been very reliable for us in production so far. It's generally been great for us to be able to have a single place to manage spend, policies, view logs, etc. Also really nice in code to have a single-line change for switching models. OpenRouter's console is so much better than what you get from the actual frontier labs, and it's nice not to have to translate numbers and concepts across providers.
Re: So you want to use OpenRouter?
#133ZDR is the main reason to use OpenRouter as it's difficult (impossible?) to get from OpenAI/Anthropic as an individual or small business.
Re: So you want to use OpenRouter?
#134I agree that OpenRouter kinda sucks, but it took about 15 seconds to see that a few sentences got reverse-compressed into what is now this article, and it's slop.
Re: So you want to use OpenRouter?
#135ZDR is the main reason to use OpenRouter as it's difficult (impossible?) to get from OpenAI/Anthropic as an individual or small business.
Their zdr is not a concrete promise though, there's no way to verify that the provider is not storing the logs
Re: So you want to use OpenRouter?
#136This 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…
I treat OpenRouter as a central point to access specific providers. Pinning is a given for that use case. I’ve tried using un-pinned models and the experience is exactly as you described: Some providers are so unreliable that the majority of requests fail. Some providers do weird things like abruptly end the response (which I get billed for and have to re-submit). Some providers are clearly running heavily quantized…
What providers do you find most reliable? And is that general across models?
Re: So you want to use OpenRouter?
#137Never had any issues using it for personal small scale development. I think the premise of OpenRouter as a magical way to fall back on error or select providers based on price/tok-per-sec/uptime isn’t delivered upon. But it’s an excellent way to simplify the experience of hopping between model providers with a single unified billing system. I mostly only use first party model hosts. Theoretically there are alternatives with higher throughput or lower prices, but it’s simplest to not worry about that optimization.
Re: So you want to use OpenRouter?
#138ZDR is the main reason to use OpenRouter as it's difficult (impossible?) to get from OpenAI/Anthropic as an individual or small business.
Their zdr is not a concrete promise though, there's no way to verify that the provider is not storing the logs
Okay, true, but I'm not sure how they could verify that? Isn't that like proving a negative?
Re: So you want to use OpenRouter?
#139Great write up.
This aligns with what I've experienced using openrouter.
Are there competitors that handle these same issues better?
Re: So you want to use OpenRouter?
#140I also believe some providers fallback to another model entirely. I was recently using Kimi K3 and saw that some requests had no reasoning trace whatsoever. Unsurprisingly, those requests were routed to the less reputable providers (Sail Research).
hi, I'm one of the founders of Sail. I'm very sorry that you had a bad experience with us! We are serious about serving models correctly, and always publish a link to the exact HF checkpoint we're using for each model in our docs. If you ever have an issue like this again, please send a note to support@sailresearch.com and we'll make it right with a detailed postmortem.