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Comment by brianwawok | Hacker News Reader

I’m just not sure they have a moat or a long term play? I put $20 in and tried a few models. Then I went right to the model provider to put in $1000 and avoid the middleman tax. Now imagine a big corp spending millions on AI. That’s a lot of middleman tax.

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And what do you do when Fireworks is down? If you stuck with Openrouter, when Fireworks is down it would auto route you to Friendli.

What if Fireworks stops offering your preferred model?

Honestly I am 98% on Claude, and when claude is down I suffer through GPT.

I tend to agree, but there's also a lot of tax to build and maintain the different provider abstractions that OpenRouter eliminates.

Everything has a cost of some sort. It's just who you're going to pay and what the currency is.

The value of openrouter isn't as a middleman for users of claude, gemini or chatgpt, it's for those looking to find a model that fills the use case at a lower price than the top 3.

Except the latency is significant and not suitable for clients with advanced agent features. The experience between using a frontier model via first party API and the best open weight models via OpenRouter is night and day. Can't get any real work done with it.

Good point. When I use it, the inference doesn't seem very fast compared to the big providers, esp Time to First (non-reasoning)Token.

The top model / prices are changing all the time though. Lately I've been auditioning 4-5 models before a big ingest and I wouldn't be able to do that easily without OR.

There are enough services that don't want the model provider to know who they are.

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