Just be aware OpenRouter charges a 5.5% fee, I didn’t know until recently. I like the product, and I think the fee is fair, but if you want the absolute best pricing then go direct.

But with open router you can always just use the latest model. If you're committed to eg Claude opus then you're better off going directly to anthropic for sure, but if not, varying other models may be fine too, depending on use case and be massively cheaper. Eg new deep seek model with same mio context window or Kimi k2.6 with 270k context window for subagents which implement

>but if not, varying other models may be fine too, depending on use case and be massively cheaper

Do inference providers have standardized endpoints, or at least endpoints compatible with claude code? Otherwise to pay 5.5% on all your tokens just so it's slightly easier to swap providers (ie. changing a few urls?)

> Do inference providers have standardized endpoints, or at least endpoints compatible with claude code?

Yep, you can plug deepseek/kimi/minimax into claude code just fine. Or run everything through another harness like opencode instead.

Or you could use gcp Vertex or aws Bedrock and still have access to a bunch of FMs without a markup.

Wow thats a lot for routing traffic.

And handling API tokens, and billing, and reliability, and middleware. I am not affiliated with them but it’s not “just” routing.

Apple still charges 30%. 5.5 seems pretty reasonable. /shrug I dunno.

> handling API tokens

Don't you still need to handle tokens with them? Also that's trivial.

> billing

Yes but you'd be paying for billing anyway.

> reliability

They increase reliability?

> middleware

Which you wouldn't need if you paid directly.

I'm not saying they shouldn't get 5.5%, but that list is mostly non-convincing.

> Apple still charges 30%.

3 of the 30 is for billing, with the rest mostly being gatekeeping with a fake justification on top.

There's nothing trivial about getting a Google API key. Openrouter removes that stress from my life. And I can route requests to providers above a certain TPS threshold. And much more.

My point was that it centralizes this to one place instead of 10 for engineers, not that you wouldn’t have to deal with these things at all.

A single point of access with a single key for all of these things is a worthwhile convenience.

> They increase reliability?

For models that have multiple providers, they automatically route your requests to a different provider if one of them goes down.

Payment processing likely eats up at least 2-3% of that

IIRC OpenRouter charges you for the payment processing fee also.

Still worth it IMO to be able to switch from Provider A to Provider B if Provider A is having a bad day.

I will not be renewing/switching over, either.

I had copilot mainly so I could write issues and throw agents at it, while I went off and did other things. Has been great for contained spot work.

At this point, I'll go ahead and leave it expire, and then consolidate between Codex and JetBrains AI. Especially since Xcode supports Codex with a first-party integration.