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Comment by swiftcoder | Hacker News Reader

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?

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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.

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.

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.

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Didn't knew I had to, but just for you: Nationally it's easy, identify the customer, issue invoice then send product, pretty much it (simplified obviously). Intra-EU; same thing but some additional VIES and VAT, mostly still easy. Non-EU business, now it's basically a full export, with all the requirements and declarations that comes with.

Edit: Somehow, the comment got deleted although I replied to it? It originally implied I wouldn't be able to explain why it's easier, so I wrote the above to explain.

> 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.

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

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.

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