[verdverm]

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?

[polski-g]

They reduce friction to using different models and providers.

Don't want to spend 4 hours getting an API key to use Google AI? Use openrouter

Don't trust Chinese providers with your data? Use Openrouter and blacklist non-US inference providers.

[dchest]

They are a marketplace for model providers, which is quite a nice business model.

[verdverm]

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?

https://blog.dock.io/anonymous-credentials/

[hu3]

Convenience. They sell very convenient shovels in a goldrush.