171–180 of 279 posts
It took me quite a while to come round to OpenRouter. Originally I didn't understand why anyone would put a proxy between them and an LLM, but it actually adds some quite significant value: 1. By far the lowest friction way to support and try out all the models. 2. They offer billing caps! Most model providers still don't do this [EDIT: maybe they do, see reply comment], but if you're going to run anything in public…
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Literally every credit card I own allows me to make a virtual card that is either single use or has a cap.
Like which one? Most I know don’t have this feature
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I’m just not sure they have a moat or a long term play? I put $20 in and tried a few models. Then I went right to the model provider to put in $1000 and avoid the middleman tax. Now imagine a big corp spending millions on AI. That’s a lot of middleman tax.
And what do you do when Fireworks is down? If you stuck with Openrouter, when Fireworks is down it would auto route you to Friendli. What if Fireworks stops offering your preferred model?
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tbh anyone can rig up something like openrouter in a few nights with claude code. its just a proxy
Today your statement is a little too ambitious but I agree with the overall point that the inherent effort based moat in SaaS is mostly gone and now it is really about personalizing your own. The most common counter-argument that I've seen here is " Yes, but no organization wants to manage all of their different operational tools. They would rather just outsource that responsibility to third-party entities". I'm not…
Hi HN! OpenRouter co-founder and COO here. Lots of questions about why we raised! First off: We remain founder-led and founder-controlled, and intend on being here for a long time, creating awesome products for builders all over the world. We are basically a bunch of tinkerers who like building things, and try to make stuff that we would like, when building with AI. Since this is about the raise though, happy to shar…
I’m offering a fully end to end encrypted open source version and hosted version of open router : https://trustedrouter.com/
It took me quite a while to come round to OpenRouter. Originally I didn't understand why anyone would put a proxy between them and an LLM, but it actually adds some quite significant value: 1. By far the lowest friction way to support and try out all the models. 2. They offer billing caps! Most model providers still don't do this [EDIT: maybe they do, see reply comment], but if you're going to run anything in public…
So you think for example you're using Kimi k2.6....but behind the scenes, it's the 4b or 8b quantized versions.
So for open source models, I've started using the providers own service. In the case of Kimi, I don't trust any provider other than moonshot not to quant the model. So far this seems to be getting better results.
If I see a provider not specifiying if they quant or not, I assume that they do.
I'll still use OpenRouter to try new models out, but not for any real work.
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I'm banned from using the free options. At some point they flagged my account as having engaged in model training against their ToS. This despite my account using around £15 worth of tokens over several months, nearly entirely through BYOK providers. The handful of times I did try a free model is when I used their chat interface to quickly compare a few open weight models with a single prompt. That's the only usage I…
Since you're BYOK, have you tried self-hosting LiteLLM? It's what I use for the BYOK option on my service.
My usage of OpenRouter was limited to casual throwaway experiments with coding agents and quick, surface-level exploration of new and unfamiliar models in the chat interface.
My comment is just an expression of a festering grudge over the unannounced, unexplained sanction on my account and the lack of transparency and feedback from the non-existent support team. There's no OpenRouter shaped hole in my personal workflow, fortunately.