Love openrouter I can use cheap models without having to have an api at a bunch of different providers and can use the expensive models when im in a pinch and am maxed out from claude or codex

well worth the 5% they take

I agree with you in certain circumstances, but not really for internal user inference. OpenRouter is great if you need to maintain uptime, but for basic usage (chat/coding/self-agents) you can do all of what you mentioned and more with a LiteLLM instance. The number of companies that send a bill is rarely a concern when it comes to “is work getting done”, but I agree with you that minimizing user friction is best.

For general use, I personally don’t see much justification as to why I would want to pay a per-token fee just to not create a few accounts with my trusted providers and add them to an instance for users. It is transparent to users beyond them having a single internal API key (or multiple if you want to track specific app usage) for all the models they have access to, with limits and logging. They wouldn’t even need to know what provider is hosting the model and the underlying provider could be swapped without users knowing.

It is certainly easier to pay a fee per token on a small scale and not have to run an instance, so less technical users could definitely find advantage in just sticking with OpenRouter.

I love Openrouter. The ability to define presets, and the ease of access is well worth the few vs. juggling lots of providers separately. I maintain a few subscriptions too - including the most expensive Claude subscription - but Openrouter handles the rest for me.

Expect you don't have the right to do what you want with the API Key (see waves of ban lately, many SaaS services have closed because of it).