The good thing about the developer experience is that it is dead simple to create keys that are time-bound, model restricted, and have budgets against them in an easy, programmatic way (also in bulk). Costs are guaranteed to be on par or lower than any model provider, so it's an easy sell to the finance department.
To look at it from the other side, Gemini is the absolute worse when it comes to key management. The labyrinth of actions that one has to navigate to generate budgeted keys for a team is not worth it and I still haven't figured out how to manage the keys at a granularity I need.
OpenAI and Anthropic both have what I would consider to be middling DevEx. Most things work, but only on their platform, and there are some weirdnesses, like the fact that anthropic disabled its admin API key creation, so you can't programmatically create keys against a budget.
I saw another comment thread on this recently. What I gathered was they hid it in the Cloud Platform, so for those who jumped the cloud hoops already, maybe it's alright. (However when I read what Openrouter offers, as you just laid out, I feel Google can't hold a candle to Openrouter DevEx.)
However, if there's anyone who is aware, was there a brief point where getting a Gemini API key was simple (enough)? I'm asking because, in true Google fashion, the AI product went through a lot of changes.
You would think that these things would be standard fare, but they really are not. Other providers need metadata from a separate catalog, don't report pricing, don't really report available credits / usage either.
So yes, OpenRouter does have a good DevEx.
And if it's not worth it, then are you spending enough where it even effects Openrouter's bottom line?
With enough devs playing with hobby projects I'm not doubting it's profitable, only that $7 billion seems way too high.
It also has way better uptime than the underlying platforms, even for proprietary models like Claude. When Claude APIs are having issues, OpenRouter Claude still keeps working because they can route to AWS Bedrock instead of Anthropic etc. This effect is even bigger with open-weight models because they typically have 5-10 providers.