For general use, I personally don’t see much justification as to why I would want to pay a per-token fee just to not create a few accounts with my trusted providers and add them to an instance for users. It is transparent to users beyond them having a single internal API key (or multiple if you want to track specific app usage) for all the models they have access to, with limits and logging. They wouldn’t even need to know what provider is hosting the model and the underlying provider could be swapped without users knowing.
It is certainly easier to pay a fee per token on a small scale and not have to run an instance, so less technical users could definitely find advantage in just sticking with 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?
FWIW this is highly unlikely to be true.
It's true that the upstream provider won't know it's _you_ per se, but most LLM providers strongly encourage proxies like OpenRouter to distinguish between downstream clients for security and performance reasons.
For example:
- https://developers.openai.com/api/docs/guides/safety-best-pr...
- https://developers.openai.com/api/docs/guides/prompt-caching...
For prompt caching, they already say they permit it, and do not consider it "logging" (i.e. if you have zero retention turned on, it will still go to providers who do prompt caching).
The underlying provider can still limit rates. What Openrouter provides is automatic switching between providers for the same model.
(I could be wrong.)
Not true in any non startup where there is an actual finance department
If you're only using flagship model providers then openrouter's value add is a lot more limited
The minus is that context caching is only moderately working at best, rendering all savings nearly useless.
But if OpenRouter does better (even though it's the same sort of API layer) maybe it's worth it?
well worth the 5% they take
if that wasn't the reason, hey that's actually a great way to launder money (not financial advice).
Or what are you really saying here? I don't understand how that's related to "you don't have the right to do what you want with the API Key", which is the FUD part.
Quote from their own TOS: access the Site or Service for purposes of reselling API access to AI Models or otherwise developing a competing service;
When you say "you don't have the right to do what you want with the API Key" it makes it sound like specific use cases are disallowed, or something similar. "You don't have the right to go against the ToS, for some reason they block you then!" would have been very different, and of course it's like that.
Bit like complaining that Stripe is preventing you from accepting credit card payments for narcotics. Yes, just because you have an API key doesn't mean somehow you can do whatever you want.
Are we allowed yes or not to make a service that charge per Token to end-users, like giving access to Kimi K2.5 to end-users through Openrouter in a pay per token basis?