I was looking at OpenRouter earlier today, after becoming frustrated with VertexAI. Similar in that they offer a menu of many models, different in that Google is running them and OpenRouter is a proxy.
If OpenRouter is not much more than a middle man, what business model are they raising money on? Surveillance?
Being the middleman is always nice until the need is obviated. My understanding is that this is largely used to cycle through free usage tiers without getting rate-limited. Anonymous Credentials is designed to end that.
What makes this preferable to a self hosted or framework built-in version?