> handling API tokens
Don't you still need to handle tokens with them? Also that's trivial.
> billing
Yes but you'd be paying for billing anyway.
> reliability
They increase reliability?
> middleware
Which you wouldn't need if you paid directly.
I'm not saying they shouldn't get 5.5%, but that list is mostly non-convincing.
> Apple still charges 30%.
3 of the 30 is for billing, with the rest mostly being gatekeeping with a fake justification on top.
> They increase reliability?
For models that have multiple providers, they automatically route your requests to a different provider if one of them goes down.
There's nothing trivial about getting a Google API key. Openrouter removes that stress from my life. And I can route requests to providers above a certain TPS threshold. And much more.