Openrouter was pretty great before prompt caching became common. Now it is extremely expensive for most individual workflows, unless you spend a lot of work customizing router preferences, and then you still get a worse cache hit rate than using the provider directly. I only keep $5-$10 in OR for occasional testing.
Something is off with them so that even using a locked provider does not deliver the same cache rate. See https://openrouter.ai/deepseek/deepseek-v4-pro-0813#pricing for instance where deepseek has 85% cache hit rate, and the same one on zenmux is 98%.
