Comment by cedws
18 hours ago
Just be aware OpenRouter charges a 5.5% fee, I didn’t know until recently. I like the product, and I think the fee is fair, but if you want the absolute best pricing then go direct.
18 hours ago
Just be aware OpenRouter charges a 5.5% fee, I didn’t know until recently. I like the product, and I think the fee is fair, but if you want the absolute best pricing then go direct.
But with open router you can always just use the latest model. If you're committed to eg Claude opus then you're better off going directly to anthropic for sure, but if not, varying other models may be fine too, depending on use case and be massively cheaper. Eg new deep seek model with same mio context window or Kimi k2.6 with 270k context window for subagents which implement
>but if not, varying other models may be fine too, depending on use case and be massively cheaper
Do inference providers have standardized endpoints, or at least endpoints compatible with claude code? Otherwise to pay 5.5% on all your tokens just so it's slightly easier to swap providers (ie. changing a few urls?)
> Do inference providers have standardized endpoints, or at least endpoints compatible with claude code?
Yep, you can plug deepseek/kimi/minimax into claude code just fine. Or run everything through another harness like opencode instead.
Or you could use gcp Vertex or aws Bedrock and still have access to a bunch of FMs without a markup.
Wow thats a lot for routing traffic.
And handling API tokens, and billing, and reliability, and middleware. I am not affiliated with them but it’s not “just” routing.
Apple still charges 30%. 5.5 seems pretty reasonable. /shrug I dunno.
> 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.
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Payment processing likely eats up at least 2-3% of that
IIRC OpenRouter charges you for the payment processing fee also.
Still worth it IMO to be able to switch from Provider A to Provider B if Provider A is having a bad day.