After starting to build an OpenRouter alternative, I realized that they aren't making pure profit on the 5.5%. To know which providers are online and performing well, you have to do health checks on all of them, which involves making a real API request which costs money. There may even be models where the cost of the health checks exceeds their usage by users. This makes me hate them a little bit less, but I still hate them a lot for being "OpenRouter" and not Open Source.
Discussion
Routstr is opensource!
Yes, health checks aren’t cheap. OpenRouter is right to charge such high prices for it as they have very high uptimes. We aim to do this in a decentralised way instead, have users do health checks.
Right now anyone can offer OpenAI or Anthropic models through Routstr and undercut OpenRouter by 5%. But they can only be considered reliable when we have a lot more nodes offering this.
Can I use Routstr with Void?
Routstr offers an openAI compatible API (I agree with need a better name 😂). So it should work with most coding/AI tools. I haven’t tried Void personally, I should check it out.
Check out this page to see how to use Routstr with various coding tools: https://routstr.doc.otrta.me/documentation/routstr-integration
Thanks 👍
i'm guessing you're assuming they are paying retail prices tho? intuitively i'd imagine they make profit at 5.5% but i can see how things would get complicated quickly with the amount of things they actually need to orchestrate for all of it to work smoothly (and its 5% on already vc discounted cost)
why not just use routstr?