Should I use something like OpenRouter or build my own proxy?

It depends on what you’re optimizing for.

Use OpenRouter (or a similar aggregator) if you want:

• Fast setup
• Access to many models/providers through one API
• Less ops burden: billing, routing, failover, provider changes handled for you
• Easy experimentation across models
• A good default for early-stage products or internal tools

Tradeoffs:

• Less control over routing, caching, retries, and observability
• Another dependency in your stack
• Potential margin/cost overhead
• Data/compliance constraints may be less flexible than direct provider contracts

Build your own proxy if you need:

• Full control over request routing, fallbacks, rate limiting, caching, and logging
• Custom policy enforcement: redaction, moderation, tenant isolation, allowlists
• Compliance/security requirements: strict data residency, audit trails, BYOK, private networking
• Provider abstraction tailored to your app
• Cost optimization at scale where proxy logic can materially reduce spend

Tradeoffs:

• More engineering and maintenance
• You own uptime, retries, provider integrations, schema drift, etc.
• Billing and key management become your problem

A good rule of thumb

• MVP / small team / multi-model experimentation → use OpenRouter
• Production with meaningful scale or compliance needs → build your own proxy, or start with OpenRouter and plan to graduate later
• If your “proxy” is mostly just an auth + forwarding layer → don’t build it unless you have a specific need
• If your “proxy” includes smart routing, caching, prompt transforms, evals, and policy enforcement → building can be worth it

Common hybrid approach

Many teams do:

1. Start with OpenRouter to validate product demand
2. Track usage patterns, model preferences, latency, and cost
3. Build a lightweight internal gateway later for:
   • secrets management
   • observability
   • redaction
   • fallback routing
4. Keep OpenRouter or direct providers as upstreams

Decision checklist

Choose OpenRouter if you care most about:

• speed
• convenience
• many models
• low ops

Choose your own proxy if you care most about:

• control
• compliance
• optimization
• custom behavior

If you want, I can help you decide based on your exact use case:

• product type
• expected traffic
• compliance constraints
• number of models/providers you want
• team size/engineering bandwidth