Practically, I think the premium only makes sense if the routing layer gives you something operational: one contract/invoice, EU support/legal process, spend caps, audit logs, maybe provider fallback. If it's just a pass-through to the same US/China model endpoints with +5.5%, I don't see much reason for devs to switch on price or sovereignty grounds.

OpenAI and Anthropic steal my money by expiring unused API credits, which is illegal in my country. OpenRouter also has a clause to do that in their terms of service (although they haven't yet, and some employee on their discord assured me they won't). Not sure about Eden AI (they have some fishy stuff in their ToS like "Unless otherwise stated, payments are non-refundable"), but at least I could sue them without buying an international plane ticket if the need arises.

But the most important advantage is the convenience of being able to try out new models without subscribing to yet another service.

In a world where it enables you to tell your place of a work “just get us an account there so we have access to all models under a single billing account”.

In other words, it solves an organizational problem, not a technical one. That’s what the 5.5% is for.

Whether or not you prefer this or OpenRouter or one of the other LLM gateways is another discussion.

Under the circumstance where I'm looking for a "AI Gateway" (not sure why I would, but lets say) and at the same time I prefer to use EU businesses because it tends to be easier and more familiar.

What happens after the AI Gateway don't matter that much, since the whole purpose of the product seems to be about routing LLM inference requests, if it didn't do that, I don't think they'll have anything to sell in the first place :)

But OpenRouter also costs 5.5%: https://openrouter.ai/pricing

Choice of models, including fully european, and the pay-as-you-go plan.