[thrdbndndn]

I keep seeing people mention OpenRouter.

Does it effectively bypass regional restrictions for you, so you can use something like the Claude API from unsupported regions such as Hong Kong, or does it still enforce the official providers' geo-restrictions?

[rvnx]

OpenRouter is great for budget control, but as they are indirect APIs, your experience with cached tokens may vary, eventually costing much more than in direct depending on the providers.

You can pay with crypto though, which seems to be convenient for people under sanctions or with limited access, or if you are in low-tax jurisdiction (e.g. HK)

[jauntywundrkind]

Caching is advertised per model+provider.

That said I think few people using openrouter are actually being selective about providers.

It took half a day to get my opencode setup, was not friendly. A lot of manually cross referencing model and providers. I was actually mainly optimizing for relatively fast providers. It all is super fragile and I'm sure half out of date; I have no idea if these picks are still fast, no promises they are still the same price (pretty terrifying honestly).

I'm mostly on coding plans so it doesn't super affect me. But man is it a bother to maintain.

[schneehertz]

Even when using OpenRouter in Hong Kong, it is still not possible to connect to region-restricted models like Gemini