14 ms·

OpenRouter raises $113M Series B

460 points by freeCandy 4mo ago

IamCompliant 4mo ago
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deleted 4mo ago
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minimaxir 4mo ago
As someone who uses OpenRouter extensively (and wrote an unintentional adjacent PR piece a few days ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48317294 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48317294 ), 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. 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.
- nadermx 4mo ago
  Convenience has a markup
- bwfan123 4mo ago
  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.
- furyofantares 4mo ago
  Better uptime? Given it will be routed to one of Anthropic, Amazon Bedrock, Claude Platform on AWS, Google Vertex (Europe) or Google Vertex
  - yencabulator 4mo ago
    That seems also very possible to do in a client library. (Though that would benefit from an across-my-nodes gossip of backend statuses.)
- enraged_camel 4mo ago
  >> 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 Why not... Cursor?
  - ajyoon 4mo ago
    Cursor's coverage on open weight models is very minimal, and it's irrelevant for testing models in your actual application.
  - 827a 4mo ago
    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. OpenCode is much better at it.
    - anon7000 4mo ago
      And its own model (Composer 2.5)
      - ascorbic 4mo ago
        Which is finetuned Kimi 2.5
      - 827a 4mo ago
        Cursor is functionally "one of the big 4 labs" (SpaceX).
        senordevnyc 4mo ago
        First, calling xAI one of the big labs is pretty funny. Second, Cursor hasn’t been acquired by SpaceX yet, and there’s a good chance they never will be.
  - largbae 4mo ago
    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.
- nickrj 4mo ago
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- 01100011 4mo ago
  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? 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?
  - 542458 4mo ago
    A library with a bunch of different providers doesn’t solve the payment/billing problem (which is one of the main openrouter benefits). IMO being able to buy credits and not have them locked to one provider is worth the 5% to me.
- Oli_dev 4mo ago
  im happy to pay 5% extra for consolidated billing and usage limits. It just makes it easier
frankest 4mo ago
Using Tinfoil, Replicate, Cerebras, and OpenRouter. Competition is good.
simonw 4mo ago
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: 1. By far the lowest friction way to support and try out all the models. 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 anything in public it's very useful to have hard limits so it doesn't cost you $1m overnight because someone started abusing it. 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) 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.
- SilverElfin 4mo ago
  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.
- fontain 4mo ago
  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?
  - simonw 4mo ago
    I'll be honest, I hadn't clocked that Cloudflare and Vercel were offering equivalent products. Looks like Vercel even have their own leaderboard: https://vercel.com/ai-gateway/leaderboards/models https://vercel.com/ai-gateway/leaderboards/models Surprising that they have Opus 4.8 and 4.6 listed on the leaderboard but not Opus 4.7.
tom1337 4mo ago
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?
- alecco 4mo ago
  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?
- bijowo1676 4mo ago
  tbh anyone can rig up something like openrouter in a few nights with claude code. its just a proxy
  - kvirani 4mo ago
    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. 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". 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.
    - staticshock 4mo ago
      An agent you can sue would count as a legitimate third party entity. Suing today's agents won't get you very far.
- m1keil 4mo ago
  Open as in single API layer which allows you to swap the model under it.
- omneity 4mo ago
  The Open in OpenRouter is the same as in OpenSea, as it's the same founder. Make of that what you will.
amazingamazing 4mo ago
Too bad api use is like 100x more expensive than subscriptions for the big 3.
- willis936 4mo ago
  Chatbot windows are a waste of time compared to API tools when trying to make stuff. 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.
- anon7000 4mo ago
  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.
  - cesarvarela 4mo ago
    I think the trick is to limit programmatic usage as Anthropic did. This way, power users' usage is uneven, allowing the model you describe.
mmarian 4mo ago
An amazing service. I use its 20+ free LLM options to allow completely free usage of LibreOffice AI extension with no signup https://librethinker.com https://librethinker.com .
- bbg2401 4mo ago
  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. 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. 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). Edit: Total usage over 1 year: Claude Sonnet 4.6 $8.80 Gemini 3.1 Pro Preview $6.71 Claude Opus 4 $6.19 Claude Opus 4.1 $7.49 Gemini 2.5 Pro $10.06 Claude Sonnet 4.5 $12.74 GPT-5 Codex $2.56 Grok 4 $4.39 Gemini 2.5 Flash Image Preview (Nano Banana) $1.88 GPT-5 $7.30 Others $7.99
  - mmarian 4mo ago
    Since you're BYOK, have you tried self-hosting LiteLLM? It's what I use for the BYOK option on my service.
    - bbg2401 4mo ago
      Good shout, that's what I use. My usage of OpenRouter was limited to casual throwaway experiments with coding agents and quick, surface-level exploration of new and unfamiliar models in the chat interface. My comment is just an expression of a festering grudge over the unannounced, unexplained sanction on my account and the lack of transparency and feedback from the non-existent support team. There's no OpenRouter shaped hole in my personal workflow, fortunately.
Scene_Cast2 4mo ago
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.
- brcmthrowaway 4mo ago
  How about HuggingFace?
  - minimaxir 4mo ago
    Hugging Face is most definitely not bootstrapped.
nkmak 4mo ago
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.
vasco 4mo ago
> ... with participation from NVentures (NVIDIA's venture capital arm), ServiceNow Ventures, MongoDB Ventures, Snowflake Ventures, Databricks Ventures ... 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.
- mschuster91 4mo ago
  > ServiceNow Ventures Well, at least for them, investing into AI is actually developing their own product. The push to replace "Actually Indians" [1] with LLMs is huge because large Western companies want to save even the pittances they're paying Indian body shops. [1] for those OOTL: https://www.reddit.com/r/ProgrammerHumor/comments/1l3rpow/actuallyindians/ https://www.reddit.com/r/ProgrammerHumor/comments/1l3rpow/ac...
- missedthecue 4mo ago
  Companies with negative net income running internal VC funds is just so funny.
throw10920 4mo ago
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. 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.
- scrollop 4mo ago
  Agreed - 5% fees is quite high considering the volumes of tokens involved.
sgt 4mo ago
I honestly thought this was some kind of OpenWRT firmware for routers until I clicked the link. "Ahhh, AI. Of course."
croes 4mo ago
Aren’t they totally dependent on the good will of the model providers?
- willis936 4mo ago
  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.
- TurdF3rguson 4mo ago
  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.
vinayaksodar 4mo ago
Every tech company now seems to be invested in every AI startup.
ihsw 4mo ago
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weiliddat 4mo ago
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. 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.
Sasisundar09 4mo ago
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zero-dark 4mo ago
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.
- dmurray 4mo ago
  > The 5% surcharge for their pricing model may not be palatable to enterprises 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. That said, the attraction of OpenRouter to enterprise customers should be that they save you >5% on average for a product <5% worse.
  - zero-dark 4mo ago
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- antonkochubey 4mo ago
  Enterprises are paying 500% - 20000% markup for AWS services so why do you think 5% will be a problem?
gertlabs 4mo ago
OpenRouter is our primary provider for evaluation data, and we've been really happy with them! 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)
simianwords 4mo ago
I like OpenRouter - lets me test out new model quickly and easily. I would still need a good functioning mobile application for it. 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 1. personal chat app 2. the chat app working with their own implementation of memory 3. coding harnesses that are model agnostic When I think of OpenRouter, I should think of "model agnostic LLM tools".
dvratil 4mo ago
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.
oddboii 4mo ago
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ljlolel 4mo ago
I’m offering a fully end to end encrypted open source version and hosted version of open router : https://trustedrouter.com/ https://trustedrouter.com/
- Squarex 4mo ago
  The link is not working.
- latchkey 4mo ago
  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.
  - ljlolel 4mo ago
    it's here: https://trustedrouter.com/providers https://trustedrouter.com/providers
    - latchkey 4mo ago
      Proving my point. Your prompt gets sent through TR, to another provider on the other end. There are zero guarantees beyond "trust me bro" that the inference provider isn't taking your prompts and selling them to promptbase or one of a dozen other similar services. Venice claims no logs, which may or may not be true, but what happens to your prompt after they proxy it to the service running the GPUs? From their website: "The GPUs that process your inference requests come from multiple decentralized providers, and while each specific provider can see the text of one specific conversation, it never sees your entire history, nor knows your identity." Which is an absurd claim if your prompt has your company name in it. It doesn't matter if it is encrypted in transport, once it hits the company running the GPUs, it is open season for them. Boggles my mind that people are ok with this.
      - ljlolel 4mo ago
        TR is end to end encrypted to the provider, and we offer providers like Tinfoil that are also end to end that we also attested using Secure Enclaves. OpenRouter doesn't provide that guarantee. This is entirely transparent. TR is also 100% open source. It'd be nice if you acknowledged the value of this.
CoderAshton 4mo ago
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deleted 4mo ago
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freakynit 4mo ago
"Over the last six months, weekly volume on OpenRouter has grown from 5 trillion to 25 trillion tokens". DAMN!! That's 41+ million tokens every second. That scale is crazy for such a small team of 48-50 people overall.
- wahern 4mo ago
  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. 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 yawn on HN. 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.
- plaidfuji 4mo ago
  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.
  - dnnddidiej 4mo ago
    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.
    - 0x6c6f6c 4mo ago
      And if you were a smaller team then you don't even need K8s. Just ECS or Cloud Run have simple abstractions for horizontally scalable services and sidecars support.
zuzululu 4mo ago
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. 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.
- iqihs 4mo ago
  agreed, unless you need to use all models i'm sitting here wondering why orgs would want to introduce third party risk into their pipelines for marginal cost and time savings
dcreater 4mo ago
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?
- iqihs 4mo ago
  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
- punkbit 4mo ago
  Maybe they want to build their own cloud infrastructure, host open source models themselves as an inference service provider?
sailfast 4mo ago
At what valuation? 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?
- shostack 4mo ago
  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.
- asmosoinio 4mo ago
  1.3B$ according to NYT, according to Techcrunch: > While the startup didn’t disclose its new valuation, The New York Times reports that it landed at about $1.3 billion post-money.
CSMastermind 4mo ago
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?
- gordonhart 4mo ago
  Collect and sell data would be my guess. Without ZDR by default they are in a position to collect a crazy amount of data that I’m sure various buyers would be interested in (not just the big labs).
codemog 4mo ago
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- minimaxir 4mo ago
  There's more going on here than just the "routing" part.
  - codemog 4mo ago
    That's why I gave it a month and not an afternoon.
- punkbit 4mo ago
  Just curious, given the $113M investment, and the state of the economy as you described. Why don’t you build it then?
- drak0n1c 4mo ago
  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.
armcat 4mo ago
How quickly they get new models supported on the API and it just works, is insane!
- numlocked 4mo ago
  Thanks! We work really hard to make sure we are ready at launch :)
gigatexal 4mo ago
Ok I’ve read the comments I still don’t see it. What’s the 113M in value add here?
- vinni2 4mo ago
  They want to have enough cash to pay the LLM bills.
robmn 4mo ago
The moat will disappear in 1-2 years
- TurdF3rguson 4mo ago
  The real moat will be the user base they've built during that time. I could copy every feature of their website within a few weeks, but I couldn't copy that.
  - vinni2 4mo ago
    Users can easily switch if they find better alternatives.
yair99dd 4mo ago
U can broadcast your tokens I wonder how to do something with such data. Aside from greping for secrets https://openrouter.ai/docs/guides/features/broadcast https://openrouter.ai/docs/guides/features/broadcast
numlocked 4mo ago
Hi HN! OpenRouter co-founder and COO here. Lots of questions about why we raised! 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. Since this is about the raise though, happy to share perspective on it. 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. 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 don't want to raise $100m? When you really need it! 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! Happy to answer questions and THANK YOU to everyone here who uses OpenRouter, and to everyone who has feedback for how we can improve!
- humam_alhusaini 4mo ago
  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.
  - laweijfmvo 4mo ago
    seriously. you don’t raise $100m just to be safe unless you’re bleeding cash or you lied to the investors.
    - tehlike 4mo ago
      there are companies who raised xxxM$ and never had to touch the money because they were already profitable.
wg0 4mo ago
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. Infrastructure? For proxying requests more infrastructure? You could just pay Cloudflare. More engineers? But you yourself are the stret seller for the same snake oil that engineers aren't anymore necessary So what that 100 million dollars are for?
- sohzm 4mo ago
  ig this reply by co-founder of openrouter is relevant: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48340940 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48340940
- svnt 4mo ago
  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.
  - wg0 4mo ago
    That signals the reverse that they might jack up prices at any time for their 10x returns for the investors. How does that instil any confidence at all?
    - svnt 4mo ago
      As I see the perspective of a typical vp champion/customer/middle manager at a large org that buys their services: if my vendor increases their prices that is usually an indication they have something of value and things are going well. It is a negotiation, buy or build business choices, not embarrassing. If my vendor doesn’t raise, and then they cease to exist, or become so weak that a competitor of mine can buy them out, then I am actually in an embarrassing place. My main job in this conception is to not be in an embarrassing place, and grow my budgets and headcount. Prices rising can even help with this, perversely.
donbventures 4mo ago
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malwrar 4mo ago
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
SuaveSteve 4mo ago
really sucks that you guys use discord over a forum
whywhywhywhy 4mo ago
Is they’re siphoning data that’s worth millions but the product is worth nothing.
drob518 4mo ago
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.
- svnt 4mo ago
  The play is the same as it always was, I assume: your data is the long term product.
- dnnddidiej 4mo ago
  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.
  - drob518 4mo ago
    But is that likely, particularly as the market matures? That seems unlikely to me. We had some of the same sorts of management middleman tools and organizations ideas 15 years or so ago in the cloud computing world and all that pretty much went away.
AussieWog93 4mo ago
Maybe I'm just a casual user, but I'm a bit surprised at the negativity in this thread. 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. Can spin up separate models for separate budgets too. It's a really simple product that just works
stanleydupreez 4mo ago
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aussieguy1234 4mo ago
One well known problem with OpenRouter is routing to poor quality model providers who quant the models. So you think for example you're using Kimi k2.6....but behind the scenes, it's the 4b or 8b quantized versions. 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. If I see a provider not specifiying if they quant or not, I assume that they do. I'll still use OpenRouter to try new models out, but not for any real work.
Suppafly 4mo ago
OpenRouter is such a weird name for this. I thought it was going to be something like the Tomato firmware for routers, not some AI interface thing.
leeeeep101 4mo ago
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lee101k 4mo ago
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kundi 4mo ago
Tried using the service and immediately switched off noticing the delay and unreliability of the proxy
spaceman_2020 4mo ago
OpenRouter’s founder jumping from NFTs to AI has to be studied. Seriously the goat of sector rotation
- HDBaseT 4mo ago
  The router part makes sense, it routes tokens between providers. The open part makes less sense, I fail to see what exactly is open about openrouter, maybe because I can use multiple models? or opensource models are available? Not sure. Tokenrouter! (already taken).
mikalauskas 4mo ago
Openrouter is popular because China, Russia, Belarus, Iran are blocked in Gemini, anthropic and openai. And you are able to pay with Bitcoin. That's a lot of paying users
georgefloid 4mo ago
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owler 4mo ago
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chr15m 4mo ago
I constantly find myself accidentally selling your product to people just because I find it so useful myself. It's great, please don't ruin it, and thanks for making it. Congratulations on the raise and best of luck!
binugeorge 4mo ago
[flagged]

460 points by freeCandy 4mo ago

IamCompliant 4mo ago

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deleted 4mo ago

[deleted]

minimaxir 4mo ago

As someone who uses OpenRouter extensively (and wrote an unintentional adjacent PR piece a few days ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48317294 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48317294 ), 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. 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.

nadermx 4mo ago
Convenience has a markup
bwfan123 4mo ago
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.
furyofantares 4mo ago
Better uptime? Given it will be routed to one of Anthropic, Amazon Bedrock, Claude Platform on AWS, Google Vertex (Europe) or Google Vertex
- yencabulator 4mo ago
  That seems also very possible to do in a client library. (Though that would benefit from an across-my-nodes gossip of backend statuses.)
enraged_camel 4mo ago
>> 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 Why not... Cursor?
- ajyoon 4mo ago
  Cursor's coverage on open weight models is very minimal, and it's irrelevant for testing models in your actual application.
- 827a 4mo ago
  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. OpenCode is much better at it.
  - anon7000 4mo ago
    And its own model (Composer 2.5)
    - ascorbic 4mo ago
      Which is finetuned Kimi 2.5
    - 827a 4mo ago
      Cursor is functionally "one of the big 4 labs" (SpaceX).
      - senordevnyc 4mo ago
        First, calling xAI one of the big labs is pretty funny. Second, Cursor hasn’t been acquired by SpaceX yet, and there’s a good chance they never will be.
- largbae 4mo ago
  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.
nickrj 4mo ago
[dead]
01100011 4mo ago
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? 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?
- 542458 4mo ago
  A library with a bunch of different providers doesn’t solve the payment/billing problem (which is one of the main openrouter benefits). IMO being able to buy credits and not have them locked to one provider is worth the 5% to me.
Oli_dev 4mo ago
im happy to pay 5% extra for consolidated billing and usage limits. It just makes it easier

frankest 4mo ago

Using Tinfoil, Replicate, Cerebras, and OpenRouter. Competition is good.

simonw 4mo ago

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: 1. By far the lowest friction way to support and try out all the models. 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 anything in public it's very useful to have hard limits so it doesn't cost you $1m overnight because someone started abusing it. 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) 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.

SilverElfin 4mo ago
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.
fontain 4mo ago
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?
- simonw 4mo ago
  I'll be honest, I hadn't clocked that Cloudflare and Vercel were offering equivalent products. Looks like Vercel even have their own leaderboard: https://vercel.com/ai-gateway/leaderboards/models https://vercel.com/ai-gateway/leaderboards/models Surprising that they have Opus 4.8 and 4.6 listed on the leaderboard but not Opus 4.7.

tom1337 4mo ago

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?

alecco 4mo ago
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?
bijowo1676 4mo ago
tbh anyone can rig up something like openrouter in a few nights with claude code. its just a proxy
- kvirani 4mo ago
  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. 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". 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.
  - staticshock 4mo ago
    An agent you can sue would count as a legitimate third party entity. Suing today's agents won't get you very far.
m1keil 4mo ago
Open as in single API layer which allows you to swap the model under it.
omneity 4mo ago
The Open in OpenRouter is the same as in OpenSea, as it's the same founder. Make of that what you will.

amazingamazing 4mo ago

Too bad api use is like 100x more expensive than subscriptions for the big 3.

willis936 4mo ago
Chatbot windows are a waste of time compared to API tools when trying to make stuff. 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.
anon7000 4mo ago
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.
- cesarvarela 4mo ago
  I think the trick is to limit programmatic usage as Anthropic did. This way, power users' usage is uneven, allowing the model you describe.

mmarian 4mo ago

An amazing service. I use its 20+ free LLM options to allow completely free usage of LibreOffice AI extension with no signup https://librethinker.com https://librethinker.com .

bbg2401 4mo ago
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. 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. 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). Edit: Total usage over 1 year: Claude Sonnet 4.6 $8.80 Gemini 3.1 Pro Preview $6.71 Claude Opus 4 $6.19 Claude Opus 4.1 $7.49 Gemini 2.5 Pro $10.06 Claude Sonnet 4.5 $12.74 GPT-5 Codex $2.56 Grok 4 $4.39 Gemini 2.5 Flash Image Preview (Nano Banana) $1.88 GPT-5 $7.30 Others $7.99
- mmarian 4mo ago
  Since you're BYOK, have you tried self-hosting LiteLLM? It's what I use for the BYOK option on my service.
  - bbg2401 4mo ago
    Good shout, that's what I use. My usage of OpenRouter was limited to casual throwaway experiments with coding agents and quick, surface-level exploration of new and unfamiliar models in the chat interface. My comment is just an expression of a festering grudge over the unannounced, unexplained sanction on my account and the lack of transparency and feedback from the non-existent support team. There's no OpenRouter shaped hole in my personal workflow, fortunately.

Scene_Cast2 4mo ago

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.

brcmthrowaway 4mo ago
How about HuggingFace?
- minimaxir 4mo ago
  Hugging Face is most definitely not bootstrapped.

nkmak 4mo ago

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.

vasco 4mo ago

> ... with participation from NVentures (NVIDIA's venture capital arm), ServiceNow Ventures, MongoDB Ventures, Snowflake Ventures, Databricks Ventures ... 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.

mschuster91 4mo ago
> ServiceNow Ventures Well, at least for them, investing into AI is actually developing their own product. The push to replace "Actually Indians" [1] with LLMs is huge because large Western companies want to save even the pittances they're paying Indian body shops. [1] for those OOTL: https://www.reddit.com/r/ProgrammerHumor/comments/1l3rpow/actuallyindians/ https://www.reddit.com/r/ProgrammerHumor/comments/1l3rpow/ac...
missedthecue 4mo ago
Companies with negative net income running internal VC funds is just so funny.

throw10920 4mo ago

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. 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.

scrollop 4mo ago
Agreed - 5% fees is quite high considering the volumes of tokens involved.

sgt 4mo ago

I honestly thought this was some kind of OpenWRT firmware for routers until I clicked the link. "Ahhh, AI. Of course."

croes 4mo ago

Aren’t they totally dependent on the good will of the model providers?

willis936 4mo ago
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.
TurdF3rguson 4mo ago
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.

vinayaksodar 4mo ago

Every tech company now seems to be invested in every AI startup.

ihsw 4mo ago

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weiliddat 4mo ago

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. 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.

Sasisundar09 4mo ago

[dead]

zero-dark 4mo ago

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.

dmurray 4mo ago
> The 5% surcharge for their pricing model may not be palatable to enterprises 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. That said, the attraction of OpenRouter to enterprise customers should be that they save you >5% on average for a product <5% worse.
- zero-dark 4mo ago
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antonkochubey 4mo ago
Enterprises are paying 500% - 20000% markup for AWS services so why do you think 5% will be a problem?

gertlabs 4mo ago

OpenRouter is our primary provider for evaluation data, and we've been really happy with them! 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)

simianwords 4mo ago

I like OpenRouter - lets me test out new model quickly and easily. I would still need a good functioning mobile application for it. 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 1. personal chat app 2. the chat app working with their own implementation of memory 3. coding harnesses that are model agnostic When I think of OpenRouter, I should think of "model agnostic LLM tools".

dvratil 4mo ago

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.

oddboii 4mo ago

[flagged]

ljlolel 4mo ago

I’m offering a fully end to end encrypted open source version and hosted version of open router : https://trustedrouter.com/ https://trustedrouter.com/

Squarex 4mo ago
The link is not working.
latchkey 4mo ago
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.
- ljlolel 4mo ago
  it's here: https://trustedrouter.com/providers https://trustedrouter.com/providers
  - latchkey 4mo ago
    Proving my point. Your prompt gets sent through TR, to another provider on the other end. There are zero guarantees beyond "trust me bro" that the inference provider isn't taking your prompts and selling them to promptbase or one of a dozen other similar services. Venice claims no logs, which may or may not be true, but what happens to your prompt after they proxy it to the service running the GPUs? From their website: "The GPUs that process your inference requests come from multiple decentralized providers, and while each specific provider can see the text of one specific conversation, it never sees your entire history, nor knows your identity." Which is an absurd claim if your prompt has your company name in it. It doesn't matter if it is encrypted in transport, once it hits the company running the GPUs, it is open season for them. Boggles my mind that people are ok with this.
    - ljlolel 4mo ago
      TR is end to end encrypted to the provider, and we offer providers like Tinfoil that are also end to end that we also attested using Secure Enclaves. OpenRouter doesn't provide that guarantee. This is entirely transparent. TR is also 100% open source. It'd be nice if you acknowledged the value of this.

CoderAshton 4mo ago

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deleted 4mo ago

[deleted]

freakynit 4mo ago

"Over the last six months, weekly volume on OpenRouter has grown from 5 trillion to 25 trillion tokens". DAMN!! That's 41+ million tokens every second. That scale is crazy for such a small team of 48-50 people overall.

wahern 4mo ago
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. 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 yawn on HN. 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.
plaidfuji 4mo ago
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.
- dnnddidiej 4mo ago
  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.
  - 0x6c6f6c 4mo ago
    And if you were a smaller team then you don't even need K8s. Just ECS or Cloud Run have simple abstractions for horizontally scalable services and sidecars support.

zuzululu 4mo ago

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. 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.

iqihs 4mo ago
agreed, unless you need to use all models i'm sitting here wondering why orgs would want to introduce third party risk into their pipelines for marginal cost and time savings

dcreater 4mo ago

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?

iqihs 4mo ago
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
punkbit 4mo ago
Maybe they want to build their own cloud infrastructure, host open source models themselves as an inference service provider?

sailfast 4mo ago

At what valuation? 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?

shostack 4mo ago
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.
asmosoinio 4mo ago
1.3B$ according to NYT, according to Techcrunch: > While the startup didn’t disclose its new valuation, The New York Times reports that it landed at about $1.3 billion post-money.

CSMastermind 4mo ago

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?

gordonhart 4mo ago
Collect and sell data would be my guess. Without ZDR by default they are in a position to collect a crazy amount of data that I’m sure various buyers would be interested in (not just the big labs).

codemog 4mo ago

[flagged]

minimaxir 4mo ago
There's more going on here than just the "routing" part.
- codemog 4mo ago
  That's why I gave it a month and not an afternoon.
punkbit 4mo ago
Just curious, given the $113M investment, and the state of the economy as you described. Why don’t you build it then?
drak0n1c 4mo ago
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.

armcat 4mo ago

How quickly they get new models supported on the API and it just works, is insane!

numlocked 4mo ago
Thanks! We work really hard to make sure we are ready at launch :)

gigatexal 4mo ago

Ok I’ve read the comments I still don’t see it. What’s the 113M in value add here?

vinni2 4mo ago
They want to have enough cash to pay the LLM bills.

robmn 4mo ago

The moat will disappear in 1-2 years

TurdF3rguson 4mo ago
The real moat will be the user base they've built during that time. I could copy every feature of their website within a few weeks, but I couldn't copy that.
- vinni2 4mo ago
  Users can easily switch if they find better alternatives.

yair99dd 4mo ago

U can broadcast your tokens I wonder how to do something with such data. Aside from greping for secrets https://openrouter.ai/docs/guides/features/broadcast https://openrouter.ai/docs/guides/features/broadcast

numlocked 4mo ago

Hi HN! OpenRouter co-founder and COO here. Lots of questions about why we raised! 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. Since this is about the raise though, happy to share perspective on it. 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. 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 don't want to raise $100m? When you really need it! 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! Happy to answer questions and THANK YOU to everyone here who uses OpenRouter, and to everyone who has feedback for how we can improve!

humam_alhusaini 4mo ago
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.
- laweijfmvo 4mo ago
  seriously. you don’t raise $100m just to be safe unless you’re bleeding cash or you lied to the investors.
  - tehlike 4mo ago
    there are companies who raised xxxM$ and never had to touch the money because they were already profitable.

wg0 4mo ago

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. Infrastructure? For proxying requests more infrastructure? You could just pay Cloudflare. More engineers? But you yourself are the stret seller for the same snake oil that engineers aren't anymore necessary So what that 100 million dollars are for?

sohzm 4mo ago
ig this reply by co-founder of openrouter is relevant: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48340940 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48340940
svnt 4mo ago
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.
- wg0 4mo ago
  That signals the reverse that they might jack up prices at any time for their 10x returns for the investors. How does that instil any confidence at all?
  - svnt 4mo ago
    As I see the perspective of a typical vp champion/customer/middle manager at a large org that buys their services: if my vendor increases their prices that is usually an indication they have something of value and things are going well. It is a negotiation, buy or build business choices, not embarrassing. If my vendor doesn’t raise, and then they cease to exist, or become so weak that a competitor of mine can buy them out, then I am actually in an embarrassing place. My main job in this conception is to not be in an embarrassing place, and grow my budgets and headcount. Prices rising can even help with this, perversely.

donbventures 4mo ago

[flagged]

malwrar 4mo ago

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

SuaveSteve 4mo ago

really sucks that you guys use discord over a forum

whywhywhywhy 4mo ago

Is they’re siphoning data that’s worth millions but the product is worth nothing.

drob518 4mo ago

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.

svnt 4mo ago
The play is the same as it always was, I assume: your data is the long term product.
dnnddidiej 4mo ago
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.
- drob518 4mo ago
  But is that likely, particularly as the market matures? That seems unlikely to me. We had some of the same sorts of management middleman tools and organizations ideas 15 years or so ago in the cloud computing world and all that pretty much went away.

AussieWog93 4mo ago

Maybe I'm just a casual user, but I'm a bit surprised at the negativity in this thread. 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. Can spin up separate models for separate budgets too. It's a really simple product that just works

stanleydupreez 4mo ago

[flagged]

aussieguy1234 4mo ago

One well known problem with OpenRouter is routing to poor quality model providers who quant the models. So you think for example you're using Kimi k2.6....but behind the scenes, it's the 4b or 8b quantized versions. 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. If I see a provider not specifiying if they quant or not, I assume that they do. I'll still use OpenRouter to try new models out, but not for any real work.

Suppafly 4mo ago

OpenRouter is such a weird name for this. I thought it was going to be something like the Tomato firmware for routers, not some AI interface thing.

leeeeep101 4mo ago

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lee101k 4mo ago

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kundi 4mo ago

Tried using the service and immediately switched off noticing the delay and unreliability of the proxy

spaceman_2020 4mo ago

OpenRouter’s founder jumping from NFTs to AI has to be studied. Seriously the goat of sector rotation

HDBaseT 4mo ago
The router part makes sense, it routes tokens between providers. The open part makes less sense, I fail to see what exactly is open about openrouter, maybe because I can use multiple models? or opensource models are available? Not sure. Tokenrouter! (already taken).

mikalauskas 4mo ago

Openrouter is popular because China, Russia, Belarus, Iran are blocked in Gemini, anthropic and openai. And you are able to pay with Bitcoin. That's a lot of paying users

georgefloid 4mo ago

[dead]

owler 4mo ago

[flagged]

chr15m 4mo ago

I constantly find myself accidentally selling your product to people just because I find it so useful myself. It's great, please don't ruin it, and thanks for making it. Congratulations on the raise and best of luck!

binugeorge 4mo ago

[flagged]