For me, the only utility OpenRouter gives me is billing consolidation - I don't really need the routing capabilities because I use Bifrost for that.
As a router, it's not very feature rich. For example I restricted the available models to the ones I want to use however the `/models` endpoint still lists all the models, making my LLM client list the 200+ models available on the service (even though they will throw an error if I try to use them).
With Bifrost, I can also create model aliases with custom configuration - for example I can create a model alias `deepseek-v4-flash-nothink` which disables thinking. I can create `deepseek-v4-flash-caveman` which injects the caveman skill (to save tokens) etc.
Plus I can contribute to Bifrost, which I can't do with OpenRouter.
Did you look at LiteLLM at all? It seems fine but Bifrost looks interesting too.
Yeah I looked at it, LiteLLM is functionally more mature.
The only reason I didn't go for it is I'm not a fan of Python dependency management, Bifrost is just a single executable that uses nearly no memory and is lightning fast.