[Dylan16807]

> handling API tokens

Don't you still need to handle tokens with them? Also that's trivial.

> billing

Yes but you'd be paying for billing anyway.

> reliability

They increase reliability?

> middleware

Which you wouldn't need if you paid directly.

I'm not saying they shouldn't get 5.5%, but that list is mostly non-convincing.

> Apple still charges 30%.

3 of the 30 is for billing, with the rest mostly being gatekeeping with a fake justification on top.

[polski-g]

There's nothing trivial about getting a Google API key. Openrouter removes that stress from my life. And I can route requests to providers above a certain TPS threshold. And much more.

[sailfast]

My point was that it centralizes this to one place instead of 10 for engineers, not that you wouldn’t have to deal with these things at all.

A single point of access with a single key for all of these things is a worthwhile convenience.

[brianush1]

> They increase reliability?

For models that have multiple providers, they automatically route your requests to a different provider if one of them goes down.