But if you use any decent amount of tokens, it's probably worth saving the 15% by moving to the provider they're proxying.
replyAnd 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.
OR I can keep paying 15% markup till next month and then jump to newest / cheapest model with one-liner change instead of being locked to a model/provider.
replyWhich model/provider locks like this, most of them use chatgpt style apis anyway.
replyThat requires that you create accounts and separately manage each provider you want to use. OpenRouter removes that - if a new provider gets added, you can start using them immediately.
replySo, you’re paying 15% tax on all AI costs to avoid creating an account?
replyAren't they all the same api? Are you paying 15 % to change one line, and not, like, three?
replyHint: It's not 15%. And there are many reasons, such as not having to keep up-to-date billing details in 70 providers, and not wasting money because most providers want you to prepay a balance that gets stuck in there if you switch to another provider.
replyIt 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.
15%? Isn't the fee 5.5% with lower fees for enterprise customers?
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