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?