[rspoerri]

I dont know why people use openrouter ,instead of a monthly subscription, if they can. While i am barely able to use up my 100$ monthly subscription, i can easily spend 10$ a day on openrouter (200-300$/month). Using top-tier models on openrouter is so much more expensive from my experience then any subscription.

[PinguTS]

All are moving from monthly to usage payments anyway.

You use the model you need. You don't need to use always the top tier model for anything. That is your decision. You can use a top tier for planing and then the agents can use cheap Chinese models. Much more cost effective.

[Freedumbs]

To create an OpenRouter account, you have to supply a phone number. Neither Anthropic or OpenAI required this. This prevents privacy aware users from signing up.

[2ndabdulhamid]

Anthropic request ID verification and OpenAI requires phone number in Europe. I don't know about other parts of the world, but I don't see any issues with OpenRouter.

[Freedumbs]

Again, neither Anthropic or OpenAI asked for PII. Only my payment information. Open Router requires a phone to get an account, which is why I'll never have one.

[f311a]

I'm using Deepseek flash for certain tasks, it is pretty hard to spend $10 on it. All their top models (by usage) are not from frontier labs.

[londons_explore]

I suspect the main use of these models is for sending mass spam campaigns and other low-value tasks which are very price sensitive.

If you're paid a Western salary and using the model interactively (eg. For coding), you are wasting time+money by using the less good models.

[f311a]

No, it's good for coding and faster to iterate. Flash models work almost the same for changes under 1000 LOC when you dictate how you want your code to look. Big models still suck at big changes and big changes are hard to review.

[squidbeak]

I agree but subscriptions have limits, openrouter's very handy for excess.