[mkhalil]

Why would folks be better paying 5.5% fee to OpenRouter ("Open") if most people just use one or two providers? Just use the provider's API.

[djeastm]

The routing automatically routes you to other inference providers (for the same model) if/when the original provider goes down.

It's a convenience cost, for sure, but it's not valueless in a fast-moving world. Certainly if you're comfortable with one provider and it's cheaper, do that.

[sally_glance]

For me the largest value-add is the unified API. Being able to instantly start trialling a new model with zero code changes is well worth 5%. The other part is not having to deal with billing for multiple platforms.