I love OpenRouter, long time user. Stripe will hopefully be a good custodian.

I just want to point out some features of OpenRouter that make it more than just a model selection and routing endpoint and that I find incredibly useful:

0/ Default routing is to the cheapest provider, but they're usually not the most performant. I'd guess 99% of OpenRouter integrations never tweak the default routing. Here you can setup cheapest with performance minimums:

https://openrouter.ai/docs/guides/routing/provider-selection...

You can also stack model selection in priority

1/ Using broadcast you can push all your analytics to clickhouse / s3 / snowflake and a bunch of other compatible destinations. Setup a clickhouse server ($5 VPS[0]) and send all your traces to it:

https://openrouter.ai/docs/guides/features/broadcast

customise your own observability in your dashboards from there. Superwin

2/ Model router is also a natural home for llm security - OpenRouter has the beginnings of prompt injection detection:

https://openrouter.ai/docs/guides/features/guardrails/prompt...

there is also PII detection. This will show up in observability as rejections/blocks etc.

There are so many model routing solutions (same with observability, security etc.) but they're all 80% solutions - OpenRouter really rounds out with well implemented features that you need when deploying models at any scale and I gladly pay the toll.

[0] not sure if these exist any more but clickhouse is resource efficient