OpenRouter vs direct provider keys
The choice between OpenRouter and direct provider keys is not about features; both get you the same models. It is about cost structure and who touches your traffic. Here is the honest math and the trade-off table.
The cost structure difference
With direct keys you pay the provider their listed per-token price, end of story. DeepSeek V4 Flash launched at $0.14 per million input tokens in its 2026 public beta; Groq and Google AI Studio give meaningful daily capacity away free. There is no layer between the price list and your invoice.
OpenRouter charges the same underlying model prices but meters you in credits purchased up front, and its business model is the spread on that flow. Their slogan "better prices, better uptime, no subscriptions" is accurate and also the point: there is no way to convert heavy usage into a flat rate. Above a few hundred dollars a month of provider spend, a $15 flat tools subscription plus direct keys wins by arithmetic.
Privacy: who sees your prompts
Direct keys mean your traffic goes from your machine to the provider, full stop. Dracon tools are browser-direct: keys live in your encrypted vault or page memory, calls go straight to the provider, and we never see a prompt or a completion.
A hosted gateway terminates your TLS, reads every prompt and completion to route and meter it, and logs metadata at minimum. For many use cases that is acceptable; for client work, proprietary code, or anything under an NDA, it may not be.
Where OpenRouter genuinely wins
Convenience is real: one key, one bill, every model, plus uptime stats and automatic fallbacks out of the box. If you prototype across many models weekly, that single integration has value. Team billing is also simpler with one vendor.
The gap is that the routing part is now commoditized: LiteLLM and opencode do fallback chains locally for free, and our router builder generates their configs from your key list. What remains uniquely OpenRouter is the billing consolidation, and that is exactly the part that costs you the spread.
Migration is a config, not a project
If you are on OpenRouter today, moving to direct keys is: create accounts at your two or three most-used providers, add the keys to the Dracon key manager, build your usual provider order in the router builder, export, and point your tools at the new config. The provider setup guides cover key creation for each of the 42 providers we track.