OpenRouter

OpenRouter has become close to essential infrastructure for developers building on LLMs, solving a genuinely painful problem: instead of integrating separate SDKs and billing relationships for Anthropic, OpenAI, Google, Meta, DeepSeek, and dozens of other providers, a single OpenAI-compatible endpoint handles routing, automatic fallbacks, and unified billing across more than 400 models. That abstraction alone justifies its popularity, but the small platform fee on credit purchases and pay-per-use, no-subscription model keep the pricing honest compared to negotiating separate contracts with each provider. Its public rankings page adds real value beyond the API itself: rather than another academic benchmark, it surfaces actual usage-weighted throughput by category, which is arguably a more trustworthy signal of which models developers are voting for with real spend, and the trillions of weekly tokens behind it give the data credibility. Reliability naturally depends in part on the underlying providers it routes to, and automatic fallback behavior occasionally means less control over exactly which model serves a given request unless configured carefully. For teams that want provider flexibility without vendor lock-in, though, it is hard to beat, and its rapid growth and funding suggest it has real staying power.