OpenRouter is a hosted gateway that gathers more than 400 AI models from over 70 providers behind a single OpenAI-compatible API. You change the base URL, use one key and one balance, and gain automatic routing, failover and pass-through token pricing. Unlike a self-hosted proxy such as LiteLLM, you run no infrastructure at all.
Large language models have spent two years promising effortless documentation for code, APIs and architecture. After watching dozens of projects try it, clear patterns emerge for where it works and where it just becomes more debt.
