The value of openrouter isn't as a middleman for users of claude, gemini or chatgpt, it's for those looking to find a model that fills the use case at a lower price than the top 3.
Except the latency is significant and not suitable for clients with advanced agent features. The experience between using a frontier model via first party API and the best open weight models via OpenRouter is night and day. Can't get any real work done with it.
