Eden AI – European Alternative to OpenRouter | Hacker News Reader

Eden AI – European Alternative to OpenRouter

edenai.co

133 pointsmuzzy1969 comments

Such initiatives are very much welcome and I am happy to to start using them. However, my issue is that it appears that many of these models are simply proxied from the specific cloud provider with fees attached which does not bring a lot of value given the 5% surcharge.

Since all frontier models are owned by US companies, I think better alternative is to focus on open source models only that run on EU data centers owned by EU companies. That will be something.

all frontier models are not owned by US.

Which are not? There are Chinese models that are only months behind, which is impressive -- but they are still behind.

Not that much, though, and the gap seems diminishing every couple of months.

Let's hope this trends only continues. A few months behind is not such a big deal. That being said, a few months = a year with these models.

Yup, agreed -- it's amazing how close they are getting! I was just wondering if there was some true frontier non-US model that I'd missed.

models run on EU servers so it never leaves the EU.

"allegedly"

AWS has EU data centers too. That is not the problem. The problem is the CLOUD ACT.

What you're describing is basically https://tensorix.ai/

There are some html rendering issues on the pricing page. I will check it out once fixed.

The point is also that you don't have to sign up for AWS, and GCP, and Azure, and Alibaba, and Nebius…

And, more importantly, that you can use the existing OpenAI SDK for your language but swap models (even across providers) by changing one line of code.

You're paying for convenience, yes, but model routers solve a real problem.

Great to see this!

Worth mentioning that Huggingface already offers a similar service. And they are also European:

https://huggingface.co/docs/inference-providers/index

https://huggingface.co/inference/models

Nice, but I could't find pay-as-you-go plan

They only offer pay-as-you-go. The $9/month plan includes $2 credits and then its payg without markup.

https://huggingface.co/docs/inference-providers/pricing

It's well buried though. Does not seem to be a focus of theirs.

Huggingface isn‘t european just because they have offices there.

Huggingface is about as European as Google, IBM, or Visa: they all have some offices in Europe.

nah... their founders and most of their employees are in france.

Very ill-suited comparison to IBM.

This website doesn't even comply with general basic standards for imprint and responsible persons and firms behind it. So if i proxy this misbehaviour to the rest of the whole: european answer-claim ... and the nameservers are on cloudflare. goodbye.

What I find interesting is that initially, I thought this was some low effort slop project, but apparently it has existed for 4 years already!

Out of curiosity, what are "general basic standards for imprint and responsible persons and firms behind it" ?

Identifying the legal entity behind the service. So you know who you're actually doing business with.

Example: https://en.zalando.de/legal-notice/

It's not a German website, so it doesn't need an imprint

German websites are not the only ones where having an imprint is required, if the website is run by a legal business. AFAIK, it's the same in France (called "mentions légales" apparently), Austria, Switzerland and probably some more too.

Not sure why you'd sound so confident and not qualifying it somehow when it seems you don't actually know what you're talking about, and it's so easy to lookup before spewing wrong information.

yes, Impressum (imprint) is require by every business that offer services for Germany.

So 100% with you here...

Even their legal documents (terms of use, DPA, privacy agreement) just lists them as

    Eden AI
    France
    contact@edenai.co

The terms of use start with the words "Eden AI is a French company" but as far as I can tell there is no registered French company with that name. There is a likely unrelated British company of that name, and a French "Eden AI SAS" that was closed five months ago that helped companies create and execute workshops

Edit: looking more closely, it's the company orginally known as "Datagenius SAS" based in Lyon, France. They changed their name to "Eden AI SAS" in 2022 (or maybe it's an alternative name? I am not too familiar with how this works in France), and their datagenius homepage links to the submitted page. https://www.datagenius.fr/ If anyone wants to send them a letter, the registered address of the company is 142 Rue De Crequi, F-69003 Lyon

That took slightly more work to figure out than I would expect from a website that has the word "transparency" in the headline, but at least they do exist

Under what circumstances would one pay a 5.5% premium so that an EU-built (but not EU hosted) routing layer could proxy to US/chinese model providers?

Practically, I think the premium only makes sense if the routing layer gives you something operational: one contract/invoice, EU support/legal process, spend caps, audit logs, maybe provider fallback. If it's just a pass-through to the same US/China model endpoints with +5.5%, I don't see much reason for devs to switch on price or sovereignty grounds.

I haven't looked at whether Eden does this, but Openrouter provides a number of these, and more. I go direct to the major providers, and use OpenRouter for the smaller ones because it saves me a lot of hassle.

If Eden provides a similar feature set, I'd certainly consider them.

In a world where it enables you to tell your place of a work “just get us an account there so we have access to all models under a single billing account”.

In other words, it solves an organizational problem, not a technical one. That’s what the 5.5% is for.

Whether or not you prefer this or OpenRouter or one of the other LLM gateways is another discussion.

But OpenRouter also costs 5.5%: https://openrouter.ai/pricing

And? The point is that it's routed to the same model. Is the middleman's nationality that important, especially when you already accept the existence of a middleman?

If you're an EU business it's easier to do B2B with other EU businesses, just like it's easier for US businesses to do B2B with other US businesses. Not sure this is strange or out of the ordinary, I think it works the same in most places in the world today.

So important that you'd switch to another middleman at no additional cost over the middleman you're already using?

Probably for quite a few people.

> Is the middleman's nationality that important

Yes, that's why I switched

> Is the middleman's nationality that important

No, it's not. You're absolutely right on that.

It's just someone you don't know who actually runs it due to no proper imprint promoting their business over someone else who you also don't know who actually runs it. So you send all your valuable business data to unknown guy A instead of unknown guy B. Oh, and also, in both cases you couldn't even sign a proper data subprocessing agreement with both guys. You can't sign it with guy A, who doesn't care, and you also can't sign it with guy B who says he's from Europe, does not even bother to provide an address to prove that, and obviously does not understand the GDPR.

Net souvereignty gain is zero by switching the middle man. In fact I'd say using such a "European" router service is actually worse than making business directly with, let's say, AWS, OpenAI or Anthropic where you'd at least know where you're buying from.

Under the circumstance where I'm looking for a "AI Gateway" (not sure why I would, but lets say) and at the same time I prefer to use EU businesses because it tends to be easier and more familiar.

What happens after the AI Gateway don't matter that much, since the whole purpose of the product seems to be about routing LLM inference requests, if it didn't do that, I don't think they'll have anything to sell in the first place :)

Choice of models, including fully european, and the pay-as-you-go plan.

OpenAI and Anthropic steal my money by expiring unused API credits, which is illegal in my country. OpenRouter also has a clause to do that in their terms of service (although they haven't yet, and some employee on their discord assured me they won't). Not sure about Eden AI (they have some fishy stuff in their ToS like "Unless otherwise stated, payments are non-refundable"), but at least I could sue them without buying an international plane ticket if the need arises.

But the most important advantage is the convenience of being able to try out new models without subscribing to yet another service.

Title is misleading. The page (unless I missed it on a skim) states that it's built in Europe.

"European Alternative" has a different connotation as visible in the other comments.

The European Alternative to Openrouter would be a simple open source proxy, not yet another proprietary service.

Is OpenRouter just a simple open source proxy? If not, how could that possibly be a relevant alternative for people using OpenRouter today?

OpenRouter is far more than a simple proxy.

How so? I haven’t tried it, I stick to one provider for my projects.

It provides failover between multiple providers (of both the same model, with routing based on price, performance or availability, and you can define presets that allows automated failover to entirely different models if you want), middleware/plugins - such as optionally adding auto-compaction or web search, detailed logging, making all the models available via either OpenAI or Anthropic compatible API endpoints.

Will switch over. Despite the concerns others have mentioned if pricing is similar then I'll take the EU version even if it's only EU-ish

Let's hope so, although, as others say, it should be more independent from foreign services if it is to be sold as fully EU-based.

didn't see any claims to being EU-based, just "built in Europe"

I don't see any difference, for me it's just a play on words. And I'm in favor of something made in the EU.

well I'm in the UK which is in Europe and not in the EU, there's also Norway and Switzerland, and Iceland

it could also be made in the EU and not hosted there

So, there is 0 differentiation from this and OpenRouter. The only difference is just that it is European in name only, but underlying services are not. And the pricing also isn't any cheaper. So, why would I spend my development hours switching to this than just stay on OpenRouter? Just because it's an "EU" alternative? The webpage doesn't even comply with basic GDPR requirements. Sigh.

yeah, why is it on the front page ? I can videcode it in 3 hours or maybe even less.

Indeed; a "European" router serving mostly US models is (deliberately?) missing the point.

How come?

You can use it with just European models if you want.

If you think a routing service based in one country should only use the models from that country, I think you may be the one who is missing the entire point of a routing service in the first place.

It’s the other way around. People are concerned about the various implications of the US and China owning all of the best models, and Europe not really being at the races (Mistral noted). Switching to a European router achieves very little against the current backdrop.

So it is, as required by law, compliant with the EU AI Act and GDPR? That would be an actual moat, otherwise most companies will probably not see the point. Why pay a EU middleman to non-EU services.

I think there are plenty of business cases where finance departments will rubber stamp European companies much easier than American ones, even if they do the same thing.

I don't think that's the case with this particular company. It's not clear who's running the show, it's not clear if they abide by any of the EU regulations, and their lack of proper documentation probably makes them more of a liability than an asset. Plus, for any of it to hold water, you'd need to set up all kinds of paperwork with the people providing the compute if you don't want to be just as impractical a partner as the American competitors.

The business model is still sound.

trying to get genuine zero data retention agreements is one of the most exhausting things to do because data retention policies are so opaque or non-existent.

aws, azure, cohere, mistral etc on here are all linked to generic privacy policies, it is impossible to tell what retention sla is in place.

to the credit of openrouter, they do state the data retention policies of almost all, but not all of their providers.

you can check the retention level for models on openrouter with the providers list. i was not able to find a retention policy for their plugin providers (exa and parallel). both log by default with enterprise opt in for zdr.

This is what happens when there is actual political pressure, need from society, and EU making big mission statements - and then there is silence. Random grifters and vibe coders will come up to fill the demand of unsuspecting masses with low quality or scam products with an EU sticker on it. Or even the wolf in sheep costume, like aws.eu

I tested for a week, it is working fine.

cortecs.ai is the EU openrouter alternative.

it is even smaller, i saw only 4 people on LinkedIn

Eden AI is a solid product and it’s good that there are alternatives to OpenRouter out there.

We don’t brand ourselves as such, but if you’re looking for a European OpenRouter alternative focusing on media models (image, video etc.), I‘ve built that with https://lumenfall.ai

> You pay providers directly. We charge nothing extra.

How is it sustainable?

We have direct relationships with providers and get volume discounts.

Besides that, we‘ll introduce paid plans with additional features like observability soon.

i would use this, but for the privacy issues:

- no zero data retention available for the router itself (rights to retain data flagged by content scanning).

- no stated privacy policies for the providers served on the api. quote: "we work with providers to understand their policies and can provide information about specific providers on request".

on openrouter, on the positive side, they have transparent retention agreements for almost all providers, and also offer zdr.

i wish there will be a time where privacy is for everyone, not just for people who can afford an enterprise sla

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