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Comment by zamio | Hacker News Reader

What's good about their DevEx?

I manage our company's model spend and build tools around it.

The good thing about the developer experience is that it is dead simple to create keys that are time-bound, model restricted, and have budgets against them in an easy, programmatic way (also in bulk). Costs are guaranteed to be on par or lower than any model provider, so it's an easy sell to the finance department.

To look at it from the other side, Gemini is the absolute worse when it comes to key management. The labyrinth of actions that one has to navigate to generate budgeted keys for a team is not worth it and I still haven't figured out how to manage the keys at a granularity I need.

OpenAI and Anthropic both have what I would consider to be middling DevEx. Most things work, but only on their platform, and there are some weirdnesses, like the fact that anthropic disabled its admin API key creation, so you can't programmatically create keys against a budget.

I work on DevEx for OpenAI's API - I'd love to hear more about what we could be improving here!

Not OP, but you can't set a per api key limit in OpenAI Platform, you also can't really easily see spending going on per key, and its also in a far off page separate from the keys, really not easy to see what is going on with spend in real time.

You're supposedly worth a trillion dollars, can't you know... pay for your own market research rather than forcing the public to provide it for you? Is this what they seriously teach devs there?

God you're miserable. Damned if you do [engage with the community directly], damned if you don't.

You should pay the public if you want them to provide something valuable for you. I know Sam Altman is a leech but you should have some morals here.

> Gemini is the absolute worse when it comes to key management.

I saw another comment thread on this recently. What I gathered was they hid it in the Cloud Platform, so for those who jumped the cloud hoops already, maybe it's alright. (However when I read what Openrouter offers, as you just laid out, I feel Google can't hold a candle to Openrouter DevEx.)

However, if there's anyone who is aware, was there a brief point where getting a Gemini API key was simple (enough)? I'm asking because, in true Google fashion, the AI product went through a lot of changes.

I am working on my own agent implementation (https://usehax.dev/), and I can praise OpenRouter for being seemingly the only provider endpoint that actually gives proper API for gathering available models and their capabilities (context length, image support, pricing, etc), reports exact routing details and total cost in the response, and provides an endpoint for obtaining current available credits (for "/usage"-like command). So for OpenRouter specifically I could deliver a really good experience out-of-the-box (always fresh models and metadata, exact pricing, etc).

You would think that these things would be standard fare, but they really are not. Other providers need metadata from a separate catalog, don't report pricing, don't really report available credits / usage either.

So yes, OpenRouter does have a good DevEx.

Speaking for myself (I'm not the GP comment): The platform 'just works', has great reporting interface to help understand excatly what usage happened when, and integrates well with lots of different harnesses.

It works

You create an account. Pay money. Get API key. Use APIs.

But if you use any decent amount of tokens, it's probably worth saving the 15% by moving to the provider they're proxying.

And if it's not worth it, then are you spending enough where it even effects Openrouter's bottom line?

With enough devs playing with hobby projects I'm not doubting it's profitable, only that $7 billion seems way too high.

OR I can keep paying 15% markup till next month and then jump to newest / cheapest model with one-liner change instead of being locked to a model/provider.

Aren't they all the same api? Are you paying 15 % to change one line, and not, like, three?

Which model/provider locks like this, most of them use chatgpt style apis anyway.

That requires that you create accounts and separately manage each provider you want to use. OpenRouter removes that - if a new provider gets added, you can start using them immediately.

So, you’re paying 15% tax on all AI costs to avoid creating an account?

15%? Isn't the fee 5.5% with lower fees for enterprise customers?

Hint: It's not 15%. And there are many reasons, such as not having to keep up-to-date billing details in 70 providers, and not wasting money because most providers want you to prepay a balance that gets stuck in there if you switch to another provider.

It also has way better uptime than the underlying platforms, even for proprietary models like Claude. When Claude APIs are having issues, OpenRouter Claude still keeps working because they can route to AWS Bedrock instead of Anthropic etc. This effect is even bigger with open-weight models because they typically have 5-10 providers.

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