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Comment by skeledrew | Hacker News Reader

Historically acquisitions have never really been good for customers. Time for me to look for an OpenRouter alternative? At least they're also as easy to switch from as the model providers they proxy.

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AFAIK there isn't currently a direct competitor, but your best bet is to setup your own LLM gateway, and add various providers to it (beyond the frontier labs, there are the open-weights hosters, like baseten, fireworks, etc)

It's a pain to manage though, and that's what makes openrouter's service valuable to be fair

This is one of those things that every engineer will be rushing to start a company for given that there is now a potential exit path.

Openrouters suppliers (fireworks AI etc) are all in this same business

Same fear. At least it wasn't Google

Why look for an alternative before you’re affected in any way?

One reason is to avoid a potential boiling frog scenario. I'm already in one with Android, but there are no viable - for me - alternatives (never touching Apple and mobile Linux isn't there yet) so I'm truly stuck. If there's a chance things may start changing at OpenRouter in such a way that months/years from now I'll look back and say "oh, how I wish I'd switched providers", I'd rather switch now just out of principle than be boiled.

Because its near zero cost now and I can do it calmly. Later, if they start squeezing me I don't want to be doing it under time pressure.

Because it's more likely that not that I will be affected.

There's basically no moat for OpenRouter, you can very easily switch them out to any other of these AI gateway companies.

This is a good moment to mention ppq.ai.

what are you looking for in an alternative?

my site is the only end to end encrypted one TrustedRouter.com

I'm working on a SaaS where you can switch between different OpenRouters on the fly. /s

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