It took me quite a while to come round to OpenRouter. Originally I didn't understand why anyone would put a proxy between them and an LLM, but it actually adds some quite significant value:<p>1. By far the lowest friction way to support and try out <i>all</i> the models.<p>2. They offer billing caps! Most model providers still don't do this [EDIT: maybe they do, see reply comment], but if you're going to run <i>anything</i> in public it's very useful to have hard limits so it doesn't cost you $1m overnight because someone started abusing it.<p>3. Their rankings are one of the more interesting signals for which models are popular, despite their flaws (most OpenAI and Anthropic users don't go via OpenRouter, it's currently not possible to tell the difference between many users switching v.s. one "whale" changing their preferred model)<p>Given how API costs are becoming meaningful for a lot of companies now, having a provider like OpenRouter to help measure your spend and easily experiment with and switch providers feels like a valuable service.
Another neat thing is, they publish hourly caching states for ALL model/provider combinations. I did some research on it to come up with a provider tiers list and found a bunch of open-source 3rd party hosts are simply trash tier <a href="https://dirac.run/posts/cache-hit-rates-agents" rel="nofollow">https://dirac.run/posts/cache-hit-rates-agents</a>
I would recommend tracking this data over time. I work on Cloudflare's KV cache for Kimi K2.6, and while there are periods where our cache rate is low, we are frequently in the 80-90% range. OpenRouter shows us at 87.3% at the time of this post. We observe cache rates change quite a bit from hour to hour.
True for Kimi, but the results I published are average across the models (CF has over 10 models on openrouter). Your current Kimi K2.6 is over 80% but Gemma 4 26B A4B is 0%. <a href="https://openrouter.ai/google/gemma-4-26b-a4b-it" rel="nofollow">https://openrouter.ai/google/gemma-4-26b-a4b-it</a><p>This is also the reason providers like Anthropic scored lower because while Opus 4.7 is close to 90%, Opus 4.5 is 45%
<i>Agents push the full conversation history into context every turn</i><p>Why?<p>Maybe this is a dumb question, but why wouldn't an agent "keep the conversation going", like I do when interacting with an LLM through a web page? (I understand how it's impractical for long-running tasks where the agent has to wait days for the next input, but assume that's not the majority of use cases)
I’m not sure I understand your question. Every interaction you have with a model in a web page does the same thing in the backend. It feeds the whole conversation history, perhaps with a bit of processing, into the model so it can process the next generation. Filling the context window is how these models retain coherence.
BTW, the openai responses api has a store parameter and a thread id input. Makes it possible to send a thread id and append a new message, ask for completion. So it feels like keeping the conversation going.<p>Technically it does retrieve the entire history and reevaulate it since the LLM is stateless. Just more ergonomic for the developer.<p>And prompt caching helps cut the costs down when a conversation drags on.
LLMs are stateless, to predict next tokens they need the history. When you write your own agents you will be very selective and might trim context and heavily segment different tasks, but generic ones don't do that (at best they spawn subjects to handle smaller tasks)
The "web page" does the same you just don't see it.
Thank you so much for this! I've been working on exactly this problem this week (which OpenRouter providers have the highest cache rate on average) because cache cost is sometimes half your cost: I'd much rather use a provider with more input caching with a more expensive/better LLM. Your results and lists seem more comprehensive than what I've done so far. Very helpful!
The main friction reduction, for me at least, is the consolidated billing that avoids extra bureaucracy in corporate environments. The API-translation/abstraction tends to cause more problems than it solves.<p>I’d prefer something that consolidates billing, but still lets me use providers' APIs directly (or via some "raw HTTP" proxy). There are plenty of unified API gateways, but I haven’t seen one that is just billing/auth in front of the native provider APIs.
They also do a good job working over the little differences between APIs. Tool calling sometimes breaks on major providers, and OR will patch it before the provider does. Libraries like LiteLLM do this too, but OR is faster.
Good points. The easy experimentation factor is helpful for development, though I would gently encourage everyone to migrate to the 1st party APIs for pricing at scale.<p>OpenRouter is also a good place to find free LLM access with a catch: You should expect that any inputs and outputs are going into someone's training database. Clearly anyone who can pay should be using paid models with privacy protections, but the free models have been great for learning and experimenting. Especially for younger people learning API programming and LLMs who may not have access to a credit card or funds.
> You should expect that any inputs and outputs are going into someone's training database.<p>OpenRouter explicitly lets you filter by zero-data-retention providers: <a href="https://openrouter.ai/models?zdr=true" rel="nofollow">https://openrouter.ai/models?zdr=true</a>
It’s interesting all the focus on opt-out from training. Sometimes I worry there is an intentional focus on that so people don’t think about the other ways the company might be profiting off our data. Like I pay for Anthropic and they don’t train on that but are they selling my “anonymized” usage data in some other way?
> You should expect that any inputs and outputs are going into someone's training database.<p>True enough, in theory; but what exactly are you imagining would be a useful-enough signal in the OpenRouter request+response stream, that any company would <i>want</i> their data as training material?<p>Even a single OpenRouter-API-key-identified subscriber's traffic, may consist of an mixture of traffic from multiple different sessions, under potentially multiple different end-users. (Where, if the subscriber is doing security correctly, then their OpenRouter key lives on a gateway rather than in a frontend app; and so the only IP address / UA / etc OpenRouter sees is that of the gateway itself.)<p>And the traffic stream may also invoke multiple models, and provide multiple different system prompts <i>for</i> those models; which, while marked in the traffic (i.e. conveyed as part of each request), makes the resulting data much less <i>useful</i> in aggregate, than if it were all training data for one model with one system prompt.<p>Plus, there are no RLHF signals in OpenRouter data. Even if OpenRouter wanted to build a general model-neutral framework for collecting RLHF-type data, it can't force subscriber apps to do the UI-level stuff necessary to collect it (i.e. the things ChatGPT/Claude do, with "thumbs-down" buttons, A/B tested responses, etc.) Analysis would have to rely on pure transcript-level user sentiment extraction.
> Plus, there are no RLHF signals in OpenRouter data. Even if OpenRouter wanted to build a general model-neutral framework for collecting RLHF-type data, it can't force subscriber apps to do the UI-level stuff necessary to collect it (i.e. the things ChatGPT/Claude do, with "thumbs-down" buttons, A/B tested responses, etc.)<p>The majority of RLHF data doesn't need this. The majority is software development and/or tool calling where the agent gets a signal back as to if it succeeded (eg compilation errors, test errors). It's true that end-of-trajectory signals (eg, did this task do what you wanted) are even more useful but even partial signals are great for RL training.
You get a 1% discount if you give OpenRouter your traces so at least they think there's some (a lot) of value.
> what exactly are you imagining would be a useful-enough signal in the OpenRouter request+response stream, that any company would want their data as training material?<p>Isn't this a treasure trove for any model distillation effort?
I've wondered this too - exactly how are our inputs and outputs useful as training data? So I asked Gemini. Apparently using negative sentiment in user or llm responses can serve as RLHF, and the human prompts can also serve as useful data for what problems the llms need to be able to solve. There's also that smaller models can train on and improve from data from larger models but that's less relevant when not switching models in context.
How about protection of intellectual property? Doesn’t have to be patented to be valuable.
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> Clearly anyone who can pay should be using paid models with privacy protections<p>Clearly, anyone who <i>needs privacy</i> should be using models with privacy protections. Some people build open source and the models will get the code anyway.
I recommend nvidia nim for completely free dev access for young people.
It's free, but not unlimited. Besides rate limits, new sign-ups get 1000 credits (requests), and once those are gone, they're gone for good. Only business accounts might get a couple of free refills.
At the moment for DeepSeek V4 it messes up caching and that's a key pricing feature for V4.<p><a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48319827">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48319827</a>
The way how you manage the caps in OpenRouter is how every metered API provider should do it: keys have limits, and you can change the limits, and you set the limits to refill periodically, and you can create as many keys as you want.
I love their product and use them myself. But where's the value proposition for investors? Unless they get purchased by one of the large cloud providers, they will get pushed out of the market sooner or later.<p>What's the value proposition for the typical AWS startup to go with openrouter, if Amazon offers similar rates with direct integration into all their other offerings?<p>The only reason OpenRouter can exist at the moment is because we are in the wild-west phase of this technology, and lots of people and companies are exploring. In 5 years they will have to have transformed their business fundamentally, or go the way of the dinosaurs.
If you believe there will be lots of LLM providers in the future, then OpenRouter could be a DoorDash play.<p>Established restaurants didn't need DoorDash because they were already on everyone's speed dial. But new or small restaurants couldn't afford to advertise or maintain a team of delivery people. DoorDash created a two-sided marketplace that made it a lot easier for new entrants to bootstrap. Today even the established restaurants have to pay them their tithe because hungry people have learned to start with the DoorDash app. A bit of a prisoner's dilemma.<p>If OpenRouter plays its cards right and gets very lucky, a large number of people will configure their hungry LLM clients to start with OpenRouter, and then LLM providers will have to join the marketplace or else miss out on all those customers.
They never claimed it was technically hard. Brand recognition is their forte. They found out there is a need, developped a product around it.
AWS does not provide nearly as many different models as OpenRouter. Perhaps they have an incentive to not do that, move slower as a big company or more legal risks to consider. If AI model outputs becomes commoditized then having one place where you can switch effortlessly from one to the next based on price might just justify OpenRouter. It could become a commodity marketplace/exchange.
functionally they operate as a marketplace for cloud providers. I feel like there is value there, especially as API costs rise and companies explore cost-saving/efficiency. IMO, this is a particularly attractive value prop in the SMB space, where it is common to interoperate between multiple SaaS/software stacks.
Yah I don’t think they have a long term play without a pivot
Billing caps are underrated! I don't understand why they aren't present everywhere. As an indie dev there are some services I'm really hesitant on trying by fear of getting an enormous bill for a mistake, this is even more true with vibe coding IMO.
There is also the ability to fallback is one of the clouds degrades in performance.
I’m just not sure they have a moat or a long term play? I put $20 in and tried a few models. Then I went right to the model provider to put in $1000 and avoid the middleman tax. Now imagine a big corp spending millions on AI. That’s a lot of middleman tax.
The top model / prices are changing all the time though. Lately I've been auditioning 4-5 models before a big ingest and I wouldn't be able to do that easily without OR.
I tend to agree, but there's also a lot of tax to build and maintain the different provider abstractions that OpenRouter eliminates.<p>Everything has a cost of some sort. It's just who you're going to pay and what the currency is.
And what do you do when Fireworks is down? If you stuck with Openrouter, when Fireworks is down it would auto route you to Friendli.<p>What if Fireworks stops offering your preferred model?
There are enough services that don't want the model provider to know who they are.
Out of interest, why OpenRouter over a free option like Cloudflare’s AI gateway or another paid option like Vercel’s — any specific benefit to OpenRouter you’ve found, or just first you used that’s good enough?
I'll be honest, I hadn't clocked that Cloudflare and Vercel were offering equivalent products.<p>Looks like Vercel even have their own leaderboard: <a href="https://vercel.com/ai-gateway/leaderboards/models" rel="nofollow">https://vercel.com/ai-gateway/leaderboards/models</a><p>Surprising that they have Opus 4.8 and 4.6 listed on the leaderboard but not Opus 4.7.
Huh, Claude Opus 4.8 is number 4 in number of tokens at 10%, not even in the top 10 in terms of requests, yet is #1 in costs at a whopping 43%!
I didn't know about these options either. I am using Cline: Cloudflare isn't an option but Vercel is. My spending is pretty low overall now that I'm using local models much more but good to know that there are cheaper alternatives to try or at least suggest to others.<p>Other features I've just noticed:
- configurable prompt injection protection using OWASP regex (<a href="https://cheatsheetseries.owasp.org/cheatsheets/LLM_Prompt_Injection_Prevention_Cheat_Sheet.html" rel="nofollow">https://cheatsheetseries.owasp.org/cheatsheets/LLM_Prompt_In...</a>)
- configurable PIM protection for outbound prompts
- input/output logging
- "JSON healing" to auto-correct minor hallucinations<p>Lots of other stuff too. The business model seems pretty simple and the value-add features don't look particularly expensive or difficult to copy.
Separation, I don't want to have my domains blocked the day AI bill go Brrr
Both OpenAI and Anthropic have billing caps… who doesn’t?
Huh, so they do.<p>Anthropic: <a href="https://support.claude.com/en/articles/8977456-how-do-i-pay-for-my-claude-api-usage" rel="nofollow">https://support.claude.com/en/articles/8977456-how-do-i-pay-...</a> - you can pre-pay and get a hard cutoff.<p>OpenAI: <a href="https://community.openai.com/t/how-to-set-billing-limits-and-restrict-model-usage-for-a-project-via-openai-api/1087771/11" rel="nofollow">https://community.openai.com/t/how-to-set-billing-limits-and...</a> - last time I looked OpenAI had a soft but not hard limit, I guess they fixed that last year.<p>I remember bugging them both about this last year, I need to update my mental model!
Based on experience, Google Cloud. No idea if that translates to Gemini usage billing.
I tried Alibaba Cloud. They have no caps. This was the reason to cancel my account there.<p>Deepseek has a prepaid model. (Pretty impressive, what fits into 10 Dollar)
Google Vertex
There is a scheme to send gifts with a compromised anthropic key even if the limit is reached.
Microsoft
> <i>By far the lowest friction way to support and try out all the models</i><p>Check out Kagi Ultimate.
What kind of compensation are they giving you?
OpenRouter is merely only a proxy. They also host some open-weight models
And what is their business model?
Credit is prepaid at a 5% surcharge.
middle man? Model providers/hyperscalers -> OpenRouter -> consumers?<p>coffee farmers -> middle man -> you
Commission on API calls extracted from you when you charge your account.
The biggest benefit is that it creates competition among models. If more people use open weight models or models from other providers, it’ll be harder to ban them. Which is what OpenAI and Anthropic will try to accomplish. OpenAI by lobbying the Trump administration for favorable treatment (see Brockman’s MAGA PAC donations), Anthropic by using religious leaders and nonprofits to push “safety” justifications for difficult regulations.
Hi HN! OpenRouter co-founder and COO here. Lots of questions about why we raised!<p>First off: We remain founder-led and founder-controlled, and intend on being here for a long time, creating awesome products for builders all over the world. We are basically a bunch of tinkerers who like building things, and try to make stuff that we would like, when building with AI.<p>Since this is about the raise though, happy to share perspective on it.<p>We believe that strong companies should have a strong balance sheets. We touch large volumes of spend, and have large spend commits across the ecosystem; having the cash to withstand what may come is a responsible buy-down of risk, and makes the company extremely durable.<p>It also tells our larger customers and provider partners that we will be able to continue to serve them (and pay our bills) for a long time to come. We don't need venture dollars to continue scaling (indeed the business is healthy) but you know when you <i>don't</i> want to raise $100m? When you really need it!<p>This is also good validation to employees (current and future) that the value we are creating together is real. We also take seriously our obligation to make a return for anyone who invests; we aren't valuationmaxxing and have the privilege of getting to pick who we work with. I don't think that gets a lot of airtime in the overall start-up world, but I think it's important!<p>Happy to answer questions and THANK YOU to everyone here who uses OpenRouter, and to everyone who has feedback for how we can improve!
Heya! First off, I love your product. consolidated billing/auth solves a big pain-point, so thank you.<p>Less about the funding and more about the long game: where do you see OpenRouter in 3-5 years, and which product bets are you most excited about right now? Do you guys think with this new raise you'll branch out into other adjacent verticals?
What will OpenRouter use the $100m for? You say that it "makes the company extremely durable" and is "good validation to employees", but I'd imagine that there are more interesting things to do with 100 million dollars.
The biggest missing feature for me is the differentiation on zero data retention providers and if a model works for the rules I defined. Right now there’s no way to hide the providers who don’t work for the zdr rules
Would it be possible to get "raw" access to the provider APIs, but still keep the consolidated billing? The unified API is great when it works, but it often causes hassle with more exotic use cases and new API features.
Thank you for Openrouter, used it briefly. Tested the product a year ago or so, and wasn't able to get structured output from google's gemini model via openrouter.
Are you thinking of hiring any PMs? love your product!
As someone who uses OpenRouter extensively (and wrote an unintentional adjacent PR piece a few days ago: <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48317294">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48317294</a> ), it's definitely the best way to try out new models without fiddling with each providers distinct APIs which is becoming a recurring concern as of late.<p>That said, I don't understand the people who use something a full agentic backbone with expensive models like Claude Opus with OpenRouter because that 5% surcharge is meaningful at that level of cost instead of going with the source API providers. But people are clearly doing it, and it's pure revenue.
IDK, but that sounds like something that would be better implemented with an open-source library to which providers supply support patches. Why do I need a company to act as a proxy and not just run a relatively simple shim layer on my machine?<p>I'm just a stupid systems programmer working in the bowels of AI and I understand there is a lot of seemingly pointless software which exists solely to provide a slight boost to convenience in exchange for money. Is OpenRouter just that? Do they actually host models themselves or centralize billing amongst various providers?
There is a lot of dumb token spend right now - tokenmaxing and such. Economic cost of token is not being evaluated carefully because there is fomo and no one wants to be left behind. But folks are waking up to it, and dumb token spending is not sustainable and will revert.
Better uptime? Given it will be routed to one of Anthropic, Amazon Bedrock, Claude Platform on AWS, Google Vertex (Europe) or Google Vertex
im happy to pay 5% extra for consolidated billing and usage limits. It just makes it easier
Convenience has a markup
>> it's definitely the best way to try out new models without fiddling with each providers distinct APIs which is becoming a recurring concern as of late<p>Why not... Cursor?
Cursor only supports a single model (Kimi K2.5) not made by the Big 4 labs (OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, xAI). Cursor is actually extremely bad at wide model support.<p>OpenCode is much better at it.
I use Cursor with OpenRouter for some projects and it's great. Most of the time I just use Auto and let Cursor use its model or choose. If I run out of quota, or I'm not getting what I want, I switch off Auto and use OpenRouter to pick Opus, Codex, or whoever(all are available). Can continue the same context if you want, type "please continue" in the agent prompt, and on you go.
Cursor has limits even when using your own key. I was even cut off using a <i>local</i> model. I guess they use some sort of harness that requires non-local resources? I'm not sure I've actually tried to use Cursor in a fully-offline scenario yet. Cline works well enough and doesn't require any sign-up.
Cursor's coverage on open weight models is very minimal, and it's irrelevant for testing models in your actual application.
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I think that OpenRouter will continue to be very popular while there lots of experimentation in the LLM space, and while the "current favorite" model continues to change between various frontier labs.<p>After things begin to settle down, we'll probably see a consolidation of both frontier and open-source models - and then OpenRouter will become less useful, because that 5% overhead is well worth it when you want to try 20 models from 10 labs, but harder to stomach when you only need 5 models from 2 providers, and each of those providers has its own API knobs that you can tune to make things even cheaper.
Is the Open in OpenRouter the same as in Open AI? I couldn’t find any repository or hosted code. Thought it'd be a open source, self hostable tool with a cloud offering but seems its just the latter?
I assumed they were open source but now that I checked they are not, they say "Open" because they route to third-party open models. Yikes. Another VC crap layer?
tbh anyone can rig up something like openrouter in a few nights with claude code.<p>its just a proxy
Today your statement is a little too ambitious but I agree with the overall point that the inherent effort based moat in SaaS is mostly gone and now it is really about personalizing your own.<p>The most common counter-argument that I've seen here is " Yes, but no organization wants to manage all of their different operational tools. They would rather just outsource that responsibility to third-party entities".<p>I'm not sure I fully agree with that counter. Because agents can be viewed as third party entities in some sense. If not today then maybe soon.
The Open in OpenRouter is the same as in OpenSea, as it's the same founder. Make of that what you will.
Open as in single API layer which allows you to swap the model under it.
One thing that OpenRouter makes easy is the ability to manage API keys (mint new ones, expiry/limits per key, etc.) that I wish that other providers would make possible/easier.<p>So many use cases, like sharing AI/assisted features externally, with the ability to use those features but also limit the fallout if its shared / used for other purposes, without jumping through more fallible hoops like safeguards etc.
Do you really need VC money to put a proxy in front of other APIs? For what exactly? Marketing? What exactly you want to maket? You're already known.<p>Infrastructure? For proxying requests more infrastructure? You could just pay Cloudflare.<p>More engineers? But you yourself are the stret seller for the same snake oil that engineers aren't anymore necessary<p>So what that 100 million dollars are for?
They are because they can, because it serves as social proof, which convinces their customers that they are doing something of deeper value. Then in reality they will use it to develop channels preparing to use their customers (and the data customers trust them with) as the product in the future.
ig this reply by co-founder of openrouter is relevant: <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48340940">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48340940</a>
One thing I haven't seen mentioned here yet and really like about OpenRouter is their openrouter "meta" model, that automatically routes the prompt to an appropriately capable model. Saves me a ton of money on not routing everything through Opus, but not giving me bad results when I ask something more complex, which gets autorouted to Opus.
Hm. Would be interesting to see the finance spreadsheets for this. Typically the B-round guys are looking for something approaching a 10x return. Can anyone justify OpenRouter being worth $1.1Bn? That seems really high for a “management”/man-in-the-middle play. But sure, AI and all. But I’m old enough to remember when every dot-com was a billion dollar valuation, too.
Well yeah if they route most of the worlds tokens easily. What if we get to a point where the 5% is paid by the supplier and they take over more of the infra /routing side that they do. Lots of ways it could be a 10B company.
The play is the same as it always was, I assume: your data is the long term product.
"Over the last six months, weekly volume on OpenRouter has grown from 5 trillion to 25 trillion tokens".<p>DAMN!!<p>That's 41+ million tokens every second. That scale is crazy for such a small team of 48-50 people overall.
Assuming that's token cost upstream, and given the multiplication factor in tokens processed per query, that seems like maybe a few thousand requests per second at most? It's impressive but for a 50 person startup team expending millions per month, that seems about on par.<p>Would it be as impressive if the context were an email provider accepting thousands of message per second, or even one accepting thousands of messages per second and submitting them upstream for spam detection? The token count might even be higher in that case, but rightly or wrongly I think it would get a <i>yawn</i> on HN.<p>It says more about how far the industry has come these days in terms of scale on the one hand, but also on the other hand the huge blowup in data and processing for nominally simple requests. Nonetheless I'm sure the team is exceptionally skilled and it's certainly a laudable accomplishment.
To put that in perspective, if you assume a token is 4 bytes, that’s about 164 MB/s of traffic, which sounds a bit less staggering.
Dealing with a lot of traffic for a small team isn't hard in itself. If it is easy to parallelise you just need to horizontally scale. And most concerns can be added as sidecars or middleware. Rate limits, auth, etc. Basically this is a kubernetes cluster. For a 3 person startup hard. For 50 pretty managable.
I’m still pretty skeptical about OpenRouter. I have a client implemented for them so I can use them with my harnesses, but at the same time that client was generated and tested in an hour or so just like all of the other llm provider clients that I have. Using these services interchangeably by just swapping out clients has so far been working well for me. I think when it comes down to it, the only real inconvenience that they’re solving is where I put my credit card number. Is there something key that I’m missing about this service (besides it being a nexus of attention) that warrants this kind of investment? Or is this truly the bar for starting a successful AI company :P
I was sort of hoping that they were bootstrapped or at least non-VC funded. I'm wary of them introducing consumer-unfriendly revenue-generating schemes.
Congrats to the OpenRouter team for securing this round of funding.
The 5% surcharge for their pricing model may not be palatable to enterprises. In fact, the OpenRouter team could be a pivotal part of the enterprise GenAI stack if they can allow configurable, pluggable endpoints for routing directly to enterprise vetted endpoints to 1P/3P LLM APIs. A couple of large companies I’ve worked so far kinda have this system in place, albeit the dev and maintenance cost and of setting up such an “LLM gateway” could be significantly reduced with OpenRouter. I feel that this is largely an ignored, forgotten part of operating GenAI apps at scale.
> The 5% surcharge for their pricing model may not be palatable to enterprises<p>Enterprises appear to be paying the API rates which are 10x (1000%) what are available to individuals, so I would not be confident they are sensitive to a 5% price change.<p>That said, the attraction of OpenRouter to enterprise customers should be that they save you >5% on average for a product <5% worse.
Enterprises are paying 500% - 20000% markup for AWS services so why do you think 5% will be a problem?
Using Tinfoil, Replicate, Cerebras, and OpenRouter. Competition is good.
OpenRouter’s biggest value to me is reducing switching costs between models. The markup matters at scale, but for exploration and early-stage development, the convenience is hard to beat.
U can broadcast your tokens
I wonder how to do something with such data. Aside from greping for secrets<p><a href="https://openrouter.ai/docs/guides/features/broadcast" rel="nofollow">https://openrouter.ai/docs/guides/features/broadcast</a>
At what valuation?<p>I’m a user and I like the routing layer and not having to change things up too much, but I’m not sure why a solid business model for this product would require this much money at this kind of valuation unless they’re trying to buy data center capacity to self-host models eventually?
1.3B$ according to NYT, according to Techcrunch:<p>> While the startup didn’t disclose its new valuation, The New York Times reports that it landed at about $1.3 billion post-money.
Yes. Happy for the team but I do not like that this likely means for the future growth expectations as a customer. Hint: probably higher costs and being squeezed more.
Maybe I'm just a casual user, but I'm a bit surprised at the negativity in this thread.<p>The 5% fee is a rounding error for your average small time user, and it makes testing new models as simple as changing one string.<p>Can spin up separate models for separate budgets too.<p>It's a really simple product that just works
An amazing service. I use its 20+ free LLM options to allow completely free usage of LibreOffice AI extension with no signup <a href="https://librethinker.com" rel="nofollow">https://librethinker.com</a> .
I'm banned from using the free options. At some point they flagged my account as having engaged in model training against their ToS. This despite my account using around £15 worth of tokens over several months, nearly entirely through BYOK providers.<p>The handful of times I did try a free model is when I used their chat interface to quickly compare a few open weight models with a single prompt. That's the only usage I can think which could have triggered the block on my account. Even still, what's the point in have the simultaneous chat feature if using it veers so quickly into a ToS violation.<p>Their support is beyond useless in helping understand the situation. I don't think I managed to speak to anyone other than Tony Bot (or whatever it was named).<p>Edit:<p>Total usage over 1 year:<p>Claude Sonnet 4.6 $8.80<p>Gemini 3.1 Pro Preview $6.71<p>Claude Opus 4 $6.19<p>Claude Opus 4.1 $7.49<p>Gemini 2.5 Pro $10.06<p>Claude Sonnet 4.5 $12.74<p>GPT-5 Codex $2.56<p>Grok 4 $4.39<p>Gemini 2.5 Flash Image Preview (Nano Banana) $1.88<p>GPT-5 $7.30<p>Others $7.99
Is they’re siphoning data that’s worth millions but the product is worth nothing.
I still don't get the value proposition: You rarely have to use all the models, you will likely end up with a few for your workflow but there is a way to use them/try all if you wanted to, neato.<p>Also one scary issue I had with OpenRouter in the early days, I think I saw somebody else's context and there were weird Chinese characters, haven't touched it since.
OpenRouter is our primary provider for evaluation data, and we've been really happy with them!<p>I'm sure they're experiencing growing pains, but a larger model selection (and faster releases for open weights models), would keep us from using other providers. For example, it took much longer than it should have to get Qwen 3.6 ~30B class models released (almost 2 weeks if I recall)
How quickly they get new models supported on the API and it just works, is insane!
What's the business model? Their core functionality, while useful, seems like something that will just be an open-source package. I assume there will be some Saas layer on top of it?
Too bad api use is like 100x more expensive than subscriptions for the big 3.
I think subscriptions are not going to last for serious users. Great to use them while we can, but AI does not fit the “power user subsidizes free/cheap users” model, nor the “support tens of thousands of customers from a small number of cheap servers” model. Everyone is a power user, and everything is computationally expensive.
Chatbot windows are a waste of time compared to API tools when trying to make stuff.<p>Subscribing to a vendor locks you in to sudden price swings that the big 3 are happy to do. The market needs lubrication for competition and provider routers offer that.
I honestly thought this was some kind of OpenWRT firmware for routers until I clicked the link. "Ahhh, AI. Of course."
> ... with participation from NVentures (NVIDIA's venture capital arm), ServiceNow Ventures, MongoDB Ventures, Snowflake Ventures, Databricks Ventures ...<p>Are tech companies FOMOing so hard that they're now all running AI venture arms themselves instead of you know, developing their own products? Except for NVIDIA who needs to keep pumping the bubble I didn't expect the others.
Companies with negative net income running internal VC funds is just so funny.
> ServiceNow Ventures<p>Well, at least for them, investing into AI is actually developing their own product. The push to replace "Actually Indians" [1] with LLMs is <i>huge</i> because large Western companies want to save even the pittances they're paying Indian body shops.<p>[1] for those OOTL: <a href="https://www.reddit.com/r/ProgrammerHumor/comments/1l3rpow/actuallyindians/" rel="nofollow">https://www.reddit.com/r/ProgrammerHumor/comments/1l3rpow/ac...</a>
Every tech company now seems to be invested in every AI startup.
The moat will disappear in 1-2 years
One well known problem with OpenRouter is routing to poor quality model providers who quant the models.<p>So you think for example you're using Kimi k2.6....but behind the scenes, it's the 4b or 8b quantized versions.<p>So for open source models, I've started using the providers own service. In the case of Kimi, I don't trust any provider other than moonshot not to quant the model. So far this seems to be getting better results.<p>If I see a provider not specifiying if they quant or not, I assume that they do.<p>I'll still use OpenRouter to try new models out, but not for any real work.
really sucks that you guys use discord over a forum
Ok I’ve read the comments I still don’t see it. What’s the 113M in value add here?
Why does a company with a seemingly health business model that is already churning profits and doesnt require large CapEx, taking losses to capture users, need to be raising this kind of capital?
Maybe they want to build their own cloud infrastructure, host open source models themselves as an inference service provider?
i wonder if it's partially because it's not a unique business model and subject to yet another VC-subsidized race to the bottom on things like token prices
Aren’t they totally dependent on the good will of the model providers?
In what way? They're just an API customer like any other and charge a bit more on top. Providers would have to carve out their usage terms to not allow resell, which does nothing besides lose customers to competitors. If they all did that then you would tap on the FTC's shoulder and suggest they do their job.
I think it's more likely the other way around. If someone is offering low friction access to your model, you don't want to piss them off.
I like OpenRouter - lets me test out new model quickly and easily. I would still need a good functioning mobile application for it.<p>I think they should go in this direction: they should make their own Model Agnostic versions of whatever functionalities other AI companies are making. Examples<p>1. personal chat app<p>2. the chat app working with their own implementation of memory<p>3. coding harnesses that are model agnostic<p>When I think of OpenRouter, I should think of "model agnostic LLM tools".
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You could vibe code something like this in probably under a month and there’s zero moat here. Clown economy. And I like and use OpenRouter.
Venice (uncensored privacy AI API and app co) took a year to expand their self-hosted model selection to routing hundreds of other models. It's harder than it looks to get customers. But they did grow to 3M users and >$50M ARR as of a few weeks ago. So go for it if you've found an easy way to do it.
Just curious, given the $113M investment, and the state of the economy as you described. Why don’t you build it then?
There's more going on here than just the "routing" part.
I’m offering a fully end to end encrypted open source version and hosted version of open router : <a href="https://trustedrouter.com/" rel="nofollow">https://trustedrouter.com/</a>
I'm reading the website and nothing about this addresses the compute running the models. If that's going to a third party (just like openrouter is), then there are no guarantees, other than words on paper.
The link is not working.