Openrouter is fragile, one good competitor and they are at risk.

Or if one of the provider suddenly decide to forbid openrouter from using their api. Why would they do that tho ?? Well it's not like execs never take dumb decisions.

In my humble opinion, it's extremely overpriced. But then, it's just the standard with AI currently. Divide every ai company valuation by 1000 and you might get it's real value.

Yes, you can get better pricing if you do it yourself. But the true advantage of OpenRouter is that, in a space where there's a new model being released every week, you can easily switch to whatever model is best at any given time without having to set up accounts with multiple providers. Or you can just experiment with the latest release. Their product is the convenience. Of course if you decide to only use a specific provider or two, then you don't need OpenRouter.

Will that necessarily be true in the future? Would we not expect that openrouter will develop the ability to negotiate special pricing?

To add to this; payment infrastructure requires a lot of heavy lifting. There's a lot of regulations you need to adhere to, different payment systems in different countries, settlement, chargebacks, etc.

There is a reason why not doing your own payment processing is a thing.

OpenRouter may have some interesting things in streamlining the process of switching LLM providers, but it is indeed something easy to replicate in comparison to payment processing.

Now that's the value. OpenRouter has the power to step on the air hose of any provider they don't like.

That's Google's real power. Works for them. Between search, ads, and the "app store", they can crush most companies. OpenRouter's power is only in one area. For now.

Having worked on web apps that processed online payments before and after Stripe I totally agree, this was an area of real pain that became suddenly extremely simple because of Stripe. The alternatives were terrible–100 page Word docs of SOAP API docs for Authorize.net, massive PCI compliance requirement specifications, horrible legacy merchant services businesses.

On the other hand, I operate an app that talks to (and logs prompts/meters costs) to many different LLM API providers, and I do not consider it painful at all. I have an AI agent to deal with any integration quirks, if needed. Mostly they provide OpenAI-compatible APIs anyhow. It's basically a no-brainer to go direct with the providers and save 5%, the great majority of the cost of an AI-powered app is no longer dev time implementing the integration, it's the tokens themselves.