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I've been using OpenRouter since relatively early (I build evvl.ai - an eval platform on top of it) and think that they're selling at a good time. An underpinn

I've been using OpenRouter since relatively early (I build evvl.ai - an eval platform on top of it) and think that they're selling at a good time. An underpinning of their model is that API calls / inference are similar across providers allowing for commodity tokenization cost comparisons, but the providers are beginning to shift to non commodity features that don't easily shift. For instance, calling Gemini with "search grounding" isn't something that OpenRouter can do (they sub their own web search in), last I checked they weren't doing real time voice models, etc.

lxgr 28d ago
> For instance, calling Gemini with "search grounding" isn't something that OpenRouter can do (they sub their own web search in) It can: https://openrouter.ai/docs/guides/features/server-tools/web-search#native-search-providers https://openrouter.ai/docs/guides/features/server-tools/web-... It's apparently even the default these days (which makes sense, as it's usually better in my experience).
- michaelbuckbee 28d ago
  Nice. Happy to be mistaken on that point as that seems very useful.
  - Whiteshadow12 28d ago
    Your main point is still right, the providers are beginning to shift to non-commodity features. Another example might be all the managed agent features, where you get a VM + model, right now it's mostly Google and Anthropic that have this offering. The service tier is another, where Google, Vertex, OAI, Anth offer it but only OAI and Google offer flex service tier and not all models from them get it. OpenRouter for me is an abstraction over that complexity, they will have their work cut out for them.
    - mandevil 28d ago
      Fortunately Stripe is in the business of providing a single abstraction over an enormous pit of complexity, so I think they'll be in good hands!
      - 0x457 28d ago
        I can see Stripe adding extra services on top. However, in their main business its "easy" for them because getting into payment processing is hard intially. But whole search, harness, VMs, agent loops are not hard to find somewhere else.
  - jatora 28d ago
    [flagged]

lxgr 28d ago

> For instance, calling Gemini with "search grounding" isn't something that OpenRouter can do (they sub their own web search in) It can: https://openrouter.ai/docs/guides/features/server-tools/web-search#native-search-providers https://openrouter.ai/docs/guides/features/server-tools/web-... It's apparently even the default these days (which makes sense, as it's usually better in my experience).

michaelbuckbee 28d ago
Nice. Happy to be mistaken on that point as that seems very useful.
- Whiteshadow12 28d ago
  Your main point is still right, the providers are beginning to shift to non-commodity features. Another example might be all the managed agent features, where you get a VM + model, right now it's mostly Google and Anthropic that have this offering. The service tier is another, where Google, Vertex, OAI, Anth offer it but only OAI and Google offer flex service tier and not all models from them get it. OpenRouter for me is an abstraction over that complexity, they will have their work cut out for them.
  - mandevil 28d ago
    Fortunately Stripe is in the business of providing a single abstraction over an enormous pit of complexity, so I think they'll be in good hands!
    - 0x457 28d ago
      I can see Stripe adding extra services on top. However, in their main business its "easy" for them because getting into payment processing is hard intially. But whole search, harness, VMs, agent loops are not hard to find somewhere else.
- jatora 28d ago
  [flagged]