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Reallocating $100/Month Claude Code Spend to Zed and OpenRouter

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Re: Reallocating $100/Month Claude Code Spend to Zed and OpenRouter

#101

Post by BeetleB »

therealpygon wrote: post #78
wiether wrote: post #13

People may feel differently about the fee that OpenRouter takes, but I think the service they provide is worth the extra cost. Having access to dozens of models through a single API key, tracking cost of each request, being able to run the same request on different models and comparing their results next to each other, separating usages through different API keys, adding your own presets, setting your routing rules..…

I agree with you in certain circumstances, but not really for internal user inference. OpenRouter is great if you need to maintain uptime, but for basic usage (chat/coding/self-agents) you can do all of what you mentioned and more with a LiteLLM instance. The number of companies that send a bill is rarely a concern when it comes to “is work getting done”, but I agree with you that minimizing user friction is best. Fo…

The two things I like about OpenRouter:

1. The LLM provider doesn't know it's you (unless you have personally identifiable information in your queries). If N people are accessing GPT-5.x using OpenRouter, OpenAI can't distinguish the people. It doesn't know if 1 person made all those requests, or N.

2. The ability to ensure your traffic is routed only to providers that claim not to log your inputs (not even for security purposes): https://openrouter.ai/docs/guides/routing/provider-selection...

It's been forever since I played with LiteLLM. Can I get these with it?

Re: Reallocating $100/Month Claude Code Spend to Zed and OpenRouter

#102

Post by wongarsu »

therealpygon wrote: post #78
wiether wrote: post #13

People may feel differently about the fee that OpenRouter takes, but I think the service they provide is worth the extra cost. Having access to dozens of models through a single API key, tracking cost of each request, being able to run the same request on different models and comparing their results next to each other, separating usages through different API keys, adding your own presets, setting your routing rules..…

I agree with you in certain circumstances, but not really for internal user inference. OpenRouter is great if you need to maintain uptime, but for basic usage (chat/coding/self-agents) you can do all of what you mentioned and more with a LiteLLM instance. The number of companies that send a bill is rarely a concern when it comes to “is work getting done”, but I agree with you that minimizing user friction is best. Fo…

A lot of inference providers for open models only accept prepaid payments, and managing multiple of those accounts is kind of cumbersome. I could limit myself to a smaller set of providers, but then I'm probably overpaying by more than the 5.5% fee

If you're only using flagship model providers then openrouter's value add is a lot more limited

Re: Reallocating $100/Month Claude Code Spend to Zed and OpenRouter

#103

Post by BeetleB »

sourcecodeplz wrote: post #91
bashtoni wrote: post #12

After hitting Claude limits today I spent the afternoon using OpenCode + GLM 5.1 via OpenRouter and I was very impressed. OpenCode picked up my CLAUDE.md files and skills straight away, and I got similar performance to Opus 4.6.

How much did it cost for how long?

https://z.ai/subscribe

Many of us got the annual Lite plan when they had the $28 discount. But even at $120 I think it's a good deal.

Re: Reallocating $100/Month Claude Code Spend to Zed and OpenRouter

#104

Post by Maticslot »

pixel_popping wrote: post #87
himata4113 wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

there is a huge gap between 'doing whatever you want' and 'illegal activities' as well as upstream restrictions (out of openrouters control)

What illegal activity? What another user pointed out about crypto isn't it, I'm talking about the fact that you can't open a service through Openrouter and charge your users per Token (aka "reselling" Openrouter), since when is this illegal?

[dead]

Re: Reallocating $100/Month Claude Code Spend to Zed and OpenRouter

#105

Post by ac29 »

numlocked wrote: post #14
Computer0 wrote: post #5

I have had credits on open router that haven’t been deleted since near the projects launch, I believe 365 days is not a rule but rather a right reserved.

COO of OpenRouter here. Thats right — we haven’t done it to date but we can’t have unlimited liabilities stacking up forever. At some point we will start expiring credits from accounts that have seen zero activity in over a year.

> we can’t have unlimited liabilities stacking up forever

The liabilities are completely offset by prepayments from your customers though. Even better, you can earn interest on the deposits without paying any out.

If you just dont want the liabilities on the books, issue refunds. Expiring credits feels like a cash grab.

Re: Reallocating $100/Month Claude Code Spend to Zed and OpenRouter

#106

Post by rvnx »

wongarsu wrote: post #102
therealpygon wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree with you in certain circumstances, but not really for internal user inference. OpenRouter is great if you need to maintain uptime, but for basic usage (chat/coding/self-agents) you can do all of what you mentioned and more with a LiteLLM instance. The number of companies that send a bill is rarely a concern when it comes to “is work getting done”, but I agree with you that minimizing user friction is best. Fo…

A lot of inference providers for open models only accept prepaid payments, and managing multiple of those accounts is kind of cumbersome. I could limit myself to a smaller set of providers, but then I'm probably overpaying by more than the 5.5% fee If you're only using flagship model providers then openrouter's value add is a lot more limited

The main thing about Openrouter is also that they take 100% of the risk in case of overcharges from the models, you have an actual hard cap.

The minus is that context caching is only moderately working at best, rendering all savings nearly useless.

Re: Reallocating $100/Month Claude Code Spend to Zed and OpenRouter

#107

Post by extr »

supernes wrote: post #22

On the topic of Zed itself as a VSCode replacement - my experience is mixed. I loved it at first, but with time the papercuts add up. The responsiveness difference isn't that big on my system, but Zed's memory usage (with the TS language server in particular) is scandalous. As far as DX goes it's probably at 85% of the level VSCode provides, but in this space QoL features matter a lot. Oh, and it still can't render e…

I actually find Zed pretty reasonable in terms of memory usage. But yeah, like you say, there are lots of small UX/DX papercuts that are just unfortunate. In some cases I'm not sure it's even Zed's fault, it's just years and years of expecting things to work a certain way because of VS Code and they work differently in Zed.

Eg: Ctrl+P "Open Fol.." in Zed does not surface "Opening a Folder". Zed doesn't call them folders. You have to know that's called "Workspace". And even then, if you type "Open Work..." it doesn't surface! You have to purposefully start with "work..."

Re: Reallocating $100/Month Claude Code Spend to Zed and OpenRouter

#108

Post by cobertos »

therealpygon wrote: post #78
wiether wrote: post #13

People may feel differently about the fee that OpenRouter takes, but I think the service they provide is worth the extra cost. Having access to dozens of models through a single API key, tracking cost of each request, being able to run the same request on different models and comparing their results next to each other, separating usages through different API keys, adding your own presets, setting your routing rules..…

I agree with you in certain circumstances, but not really for internal user inference. OpenRouter is great if you need to maintain uptime, but for basic usage (chat/coding/self-agents) you can do all of what you mentioned and more with a LiteLLM instance. The number of companies that send a bill is rarely a concern when it comes to “is work getting done”, but I agree with you that minimizing user friction is best. Fo…

Does OpenRouter perform better than LiteLLM on integration though? I found using Anthropic's models through a LiteLLM-laundered OpenAI-style API to perform noticably worse than using Anthropic's API directly. So I've scrapped considering LiteLLM as an option. It's also just a buggy mess from trying to use their MCP server. The errors it puts out are meaningless, and the UI behaves oddly even in the happy path (error message colored green with Success: prepended).

But if OpenRouter does better (even though it's the same sort of API layer) maybe it's worth it?

Re: Reallocating $100/Month Claude Code Spend to Zed and OpenRouter

#110

Post by jsumrall »

ElFitz wrote: post #15

Has anyone (other than OpenClaw) used pi? ( https://shittycodingagent.ai/ , https://pi.dev/ ) Any insights / suggestions / best practices?

Its really fantastic. I can't imagine why you'd go through the effort using Claude Code with other models when pi is a much better harness. There's tons of extensions already available, and its trivial to prompt an LLM to create your any new extension you want. Lacking creativity and want something from another harness?

> Run in tmux and interrogate it how feature X works, then build me the equivalent as a pi extension.

Maybe in a few years there will be obvious patterns with harnesses having built really optimal flows, but right now it works so much better to experiment and try new approaches and prompts and flows, and pi is the easiest one to tweak and make it your own.

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