The idea is that at some point in future, we release new and improved router configurations which do take small margins, but from the user perspective they're still paying less than using a single endpoint. We don't intend to inflate the price when users only use the single-sign-on benefits. Negotiating discounts with backend providers is another possibility, but right now we're just focused on providing value.
Honestly, I’d feel a lot more secure about building on this if you did take (for example) a small fixed fee every month. Or a 10% commission on any requests (volume discounts on that commission for high-volume users?).
If I start using you now you’ll either disappear in the future or you’ll suddenly start charging more, neither of which I like.
I’m already paying for inference, a little amount on top of that for the convenience of a single API is pretty useful.
Agree heavily with this sentiment. It sounds like this could be a useful tool for a personal project of mine, but I wasn't nearly as interested after reading they're not attempting to make money yet. I'm a bit burnt out on that business model. Predictability is just as important as price when I'm deciding how to invest a large portion of my free time. I happily gave OpenRouter $20 for their service, and I've barely dented the credits with thousands of test runs over two months.
On that note, I think I'd be even more likely to pay for Unify.ai if I could opt to bypass the auto-routing and use it the same way I use OpenRouter - a single endpoint to route to any model I want. Sometimes I've already determined the best model for a task, and other times I want redundant models for the same task. It's possible Unify has this option, though I didn't see it while skimming the docs.
But really, all in all, this is a super cool project and I'm happy it was shared.
Makes sense, thanks a lot for the feedback. We're pretty confident that future versions of our router will provide sufficient value where we can take margins here, we therefore don't expect the need to start charging for Single-sign-on (SSO) alone. The SSO benefits are only the beginning in my mind, our main value will come from custom benchmarks across all models + providers and optimizing LLM applications, including agentic workfows. I do very much see your point though. Thankfully, we're very fortunate to have several years of runway, so we don't plan on disappearing anytime too soon!
A common model in some cost cutting software is to charge x% of the total savings... Win/win...just a suggestion... use picks "main LLM" and you calculate the "non optimized cost" based on that. Whatever savings you drive you take a share of the savings.
however, as janekm says, we can't charge just based on cost savings. We would need the router points to be sufficiently compelling wrt quality, speed and cost (including our own margins) that users still sometimes opt for these router points. Suffice it to say, if any router configs do start to take margins, then this will be clearly reflected in the overall router cost plotted on the scatter graph. UX will not be affected.
