What does openrouter actually do though? They buy a bunch of tokens from token providers and allow you to easily route queries between token processors?
This seems like the kind of thing that you can have Claude write in an afternoon for whatever service you're running. I don't see the value.
My understanding is that it’s a common LLM API with common billing for multiple LLM providers. You can switch between LLM providers whenever you like, and the way you pay for API usage doesn’t change. You don’t even need to create an account with the LLM provider.
I don’t use OpenRouter, but exe.dev has a similar feature. I choose which LLM to use in a pulldown menu.
But the downside of this is that you’re paying API prices, which are much higher than subscription prices.
So, recently they added a way to connect a ChatGPT subscription and I mostly use that. But I can try out other models any time.
So this doesn’t seem like all that much of a moat to me, but it’s still a convenient service to have, since you aren’t going to set up billing with all the LLM providers in an afternoon. I expect there will be multiple competitive businesses.
Compare with what distributors do for physical goods.
people are lazy
people don't want to maintain infra (ie adding new models all the time)
people want their queries to work without thinking
if a provider goes down, openrouter queries dont (ideally)
it's really not that complex to understand
i think plenty of people don't want to be forced to using just Claude and ChatGPT