For me, the only utility OpenRouter gives me is billing consolidation - I don't really need the routing capabilities because I use Bifrost for that.

As a router, it's not very feature rich. For example I restricted the available models to the ones I want to use however the `/models` endpoint still lists all the models, making my LLM client list the 200+ models available on the service (even though they will throw an error if I try to use them).

With Bifrost, I can also create model aliases with custom configuration - for example I can create a model alias `deepseek-v4-flash-nothink` which disables thinking. I can create `deepseek-v4-flash-caveman` which injects the caveman skill (to save tokens) etc.

Plus I can contribute to Bifrost, which I can't do with OpenRouter.

openrouter’s API has removed parameters specific to certain models, impairing model functionality.

For example, the image generation parameters of GPT-image-2 are largely ineffective.