llmcloud.ai vs OpenRouter
OpenRouter proved the one-endpoint idea and built the market. We take a different position on three things: what the gateway costs, which providers get to serve you, and whether the product has an opinion.
| Dimension | llmcloud.ai | Typical marketplace gateway |
|---|---|---|
| Gateway fee | $0. Forever. Routing, caching, failover, analytics and guardrails are free. | A percentage cut applied on top of inference spend. |
| Token pricing | Provider list price, passed through at cost, itemised on every receipt. | Provider price plus the platform cut, bundled into credits. |
| Prepaid credits | No credit float. Pay for what you used, in arrears, in your own currency. | Prepaid credit balance held by the platform. |
| BYOK | Free. Your keys, zero markup, no per-request surcharge. | Available, typically with a fee on BYOK traffic. |
| Provider vetting | Published 5-criterion rubric, dated scorecards, monthly or quarterly re-evaluation. | Broad marketplace listing; vetting criteria not published. |
| Serving integrity | Weekly canary probes for quantization drift and silent model substitution. | Provider-reported; users detect drift from their own evals. |
| Model guidance | One named default, cheap alternate and escape hatch per workload. | Usage-ranked leaderboards; you decide. |
| Routing transparency | Every response returns the upstream, the policy that chose it and the cost delta. | Provider shown; policy rationale not exposed. |
| Compliance surface | Per-jurisdiction pages, residency pinning, attestation log with signed hashes. | Platform-level policies. |
| Self-host | Container image plus Terraform; control plane can run entirely in your VPC. | Hosted service only. |
Comparison reflects publicly documented behaviour of marketplace-style gateways at time of writing. Verify current terms with each vendor before switching.
The gateway is free. Forever.
No routing cut, no credit float, no BYOK surcharge. You pay the provider's list price and see it itemised.
Every provider is graded.
A published rubric, our own probes, dated scorecards. Below the bar means out of default routing.
We name the model.
Per workload: one default, one cheap alternate, one escape hatch — and the directive that encodes it.
Frequently asked
If the gateway is free, how do you make money?+
Three ways, none of them a tax on routing: Enterprise (SSO/SCIM, audit evidence bundles, dedicated capacity, support SLA), our own hosted open-weight fleet where we are the provider and earn the normal inference margin, and self-host licences. Routing itself never becomes a revenue line — that is the commitment.
Is 'free forever' really forever?+
For the gateway, yes. Routing, failover, caching, analytics, keys and guardrails stay at $0 for individual developers and teams. If that ever changes for existing users, it would be with a year of notice and a permanent grandfathered tier — but the business model is built so it does not need to.
Are model IDs compatible with OpenRouter?+
Yes. provider/model IDs map 1:1, and :nitro / :floor variants translate to auto:speed and auto:cost. Migration is a base URL and a key.
Do you list every provider like OpenRouter does?+
No, and that is deliberate. A provider that will not publish retention terms, discloses no quantization, or fails the load harness does not serve default traffic. You can still pin it explicitly if you want it — you just have to opt in with the scorecard in front of you.