I am not the person you are responding to but I have tried both: using OpenRouter and also giving a Chinese company $5 on my credit card to buy tokens. If I know what model I want to experiment with, I much prefer to just pay $5 and have plenty of tokens to experiment. On a yearly basis, this is a very tiny expense for the benefits of getting plenty of tokens to experiment with.
I am not the person you are responding to but I have tried both: using OpenRouter and also giving a Chinese company $5 on my credit card to buy tokens. If I know what model I want to experiment with, I much prefer to just pay $5 and have plenty of tokens to experiment. On a yearly basis, this is a very tiny expense for the benefits of getting plenty of tokens to experiment with.