OpenRouter raised $113 million. It has never trained a model, never hosted one, never written a line of anything you would pay for. It is a turnstile. You want the model, the model is on the other side, and OpenRouter is the guy standing in the doorway with his hand out. The "Open" means what it means at OpenAI, which is nothing. People went looking for the open part and found a pricing page.
The company calls this:
Routing, reliability, cost optimization, and compliance that production AI demands.
A toll booth that thinks it built the highway.
It skims roughly 5% off models other people made and other people run, and 5% of everyone else's work is, it turns out, a $113 million business. They will tell you about the 25 trillion tokens a week, because 25 trillion is the kind of number you wave around when you would die before saying the word "markup" out loud.
And who paid up? CapitalG, which is Google. NVIDIA. Snowflake, Databricks, MongoDB, ServiceNow. Every company that owns a pipe wrote a check to the man charging admission to the pipes. They could have built a router over a long weekend. They paid $113 million instead, which tells you exactly what a router is worth and exactly how much they hoped you wouldn't notice.