FilterHN

I was looking at OpenRouter earlier today, after becoming frustrated with VertexAI. Similar in that they offer a menu of many models, different in that Google is running them and OpenRouter is a proxy.

If OpenRouter is not much more than a middle man, what business model are they raising money on? Surveillance?

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dchest

4 hours ago

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They are a marketplace for model providers, which is quite a nice business model.

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verdverm

4 hours ago

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Being the middleman is always nice until the need is obviated. My understanding is that this is largely used to cycle through free usage tiers without getting rate-limited. Anonymous Credentials is designed to end that.

What makes this preferable to a self hosted or framework built-in version?

https://blog.dock.io/anonymous-credentials/

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hu3

4 minutes ago

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Convenience. They sell very convenient shovels in a goldrush.

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polski-g

1 hour ago

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They reduce friction to using different models and providers.

Don't want to spend 4 hours getting an API key to use Google AI? Use openrouter

Don't trust Chinese providers with your data? Use Openrouter and blacklist non-US inference providers.