> handling API tokens

Don't you still need to handle tokens with them? Also that's trivial.

> billing

Yes but you'd be paying for billing anyway.

> reliability

They increase reliability?

> middleware

Which you wouldn't need if you paid directly.

I'm not saying they shouldn't get 5.5%, but that list is mostly non-convincing.

> Apple still charges 30%.

3 of the 30 is for billing, with the rest mostly being gatekeeping with a fake justification on top.

There's nothing trivial about getting a Google API key. Openrouter removes that stress from my life. And I can route requests to providers above a certain TPS threshold. And much more.

My point was that it centralizes this to one place instead of 10 for engineers, not that you wouldn’t have to deal with these things at all.

A single point of access with a single key for all of these things is a worthwhile convenience.

> They increase reliability?

For models that have multiple providers, they automatically route your requests to a different provider if one of them goes down.