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Home > Reviews > OpenRouter
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Review: OpenRouter  |
| Product type: |
Mailroom (program) |
Maker: |
OpenRouter, Inc., which is not Linksys, and I checked |
| Price: |
Free to look. About five (5) percent on top, which is a markup, and I have no quarrel with a markup |
Date reviewed: |
09/11/2026 |
| Tested on: |
The other computer (Denise's laptop, Windows 10). See About. |
What I Was Told This Was
OpenRouter calls itself "the unified interface for LLMs." I do not know what an LLM is and the site did not say. Kyle sent the address with the words "all of them in one place," and since the name has router in it I got the binder out and had the Linksys password ready. It is admin. It did not come up.
It is not for the router. Kyle says it is "a proxy." I know the word. In 1999 the office had a blue box from Cisco in the closet, the size of a fax machine and twice the price, and everything went through it on the way out. The contractor called it the proxy. I said, so it is a mailroom. He said yes. A company paying Cisco for a mailroom for a wire was the funniest thing I heard that year and I told it at the Christmas party. Cisco did not send a rep. Cisco never sent a rep. I have not forgotten.
It is not funny now. Now the mailroom is the business. OpenRouter sits between you and every program behind the sparkle button, Claude included (see Claude), and sends one bill. That is also a distributor, and I ran one from 1991 to 2019, so I'll be frank: I know this building.
What Happened
The front of the site has a box, the same box as Claude. I typed the page memory question, since I now know the answer and can grade on it, and pressed Enter. A window came up and asked me to sign in. The question was gone from the box. I did not sign in, on principle. I asked Kyle where the question went and he said "through." I saw a piece on the news about the padlock people in San Francisco, who have a wall of lava lamps with a camera on it, and the lamps make the secret numbers, and half the internet goes through that building on the way to wherever it was going. I have a lava lamp. It was Denise's from college. Nobody has asked it for a number. My question went through somebody's lamp and did not come back.
So I went to the price sheet, which they call Models, and a price sheet I understand. More than four hundred (400) lines. Our full line never went past sixty (60), and half of those were toner. Claude was on it four (4) times, with different numbers after the name, at four prices. The same Brother came through us once, with one number.
The prices are given per M. M is a thousand. It is on every ream of paper I ever ordered, and it is Roman. On this site M is a million, and nowhere does it say so, so a man reading with his own eyes is off by a thousand, in their favor.
Near the top there is a model called Auto. Auto is not a model. Auto picks one of the other four hundred for you, "the best one for your prompt." I had a rep in 1997 who would pick for you. He picked the one with the spiff on it every time. A mailroom that opens the mail and decides who gets it is not a mailroom. It is a manager, and I was the manager.
A Note on Denise
Denise came by with the laundry, looked at the sheet for as long as it takes to fold a towel, and said "that's per million, Lyle, it says so if you put the arrow on the M." A letter is not a button. She put the arrow on it and a small box said "per million tokens" and went away when she took the arrow off, so the price is only correct while somebody is touching it. She also said we already have an account "from Kyle's thing." I did not ask.
Verdict
OpenRouter is the mailroom from 1999 with a four-hundred-page catalog on the counter and no order form. The sheet is in order. But I could not buy anything, I could not ask anything, the one letter that mattered was wrong by a thousand unless you touch it, and what I typed went through a man in the middle who did not sign for it.
I completed no action. I read. Reading a price sheet is not an action, it is a Tuesday. But it worked, in the sense that I could see it, and that is the definition of a two (2). In twenty-eight years we never once charged a customer to open the catalog, and when they wanted the manufacturer we gave them the number, and it was a fax number.
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Reader Mail on this review (2 entries from the Guestbook)
"Auto doesn't have a spiff. It routes each prompt to whichever model fits it best, based on what you asked. It's actually the honest option: you don't have to know the four hundred names." – Dev, San Francisco, CA, 09/19/2026
Lyle responds: Thank you Dev. My rep in 1997 also said he picked what fit best. It is always the spiff. If there is no spiff, it is the only distributor in history without one, and I would want to see that in writing, per M, with the M defined.
"Lyle, it's mostly for programmers. You get a key and your own program talks to the models through it. The chat box on the front is a demo. And a token is roughly three quarters of a word, so a million is about a novel, which is why it's priced that way." – Priya, Austin, TX, 09/14/2026
Lyle responds: Thank you Priya. A distributor that only sells to programmers is a distributor with one customer, and I have seen how that ends. As to the novel, I have never bought one by the pound and I am not going to start with a program.
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