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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://n
by minimaxir 5mo 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 5mo agoConvenience has a markup
- bwfan123 5mo agoThere 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 5mo agoBetter uptime? Given it will be routed to one of Anthropic, Amazon Bedrock, Claude Platform on AWS, Google Vertex (Europe) or Google Vertex
- yencabulator 5mo agoThat 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 5mo 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 5mo agoCursor's coverage on open weight models is very minimal, and it's irrelevant for testing models in your actual application.
- 827a 5mo agoCursor 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 5mo agoAnd its own model (Composer 2.5)
- ascorbic 5mo agoWhich is finetuned Kimi 2.5
- 827a 5mo agoCursor is functionally "one of the big 4 labs" (SpaceX).
- senordevnyc 5mo agoFirst, 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 5mo agoI 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.
- 5mo ago
- nickrj 5mo ago[dead]
- 01100011 5mo agoIDK, 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 5mo agoA 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 5mo agoim happy to pay 5% extra for consolidated billing and usage limits. It just makes it easier