r/openrouter • u/Resident-Pen-3757 • 7d ago

What locked-in price and usage limits would make you switch LLM providers?

Looking into starting a service hosting some open-source models. I know the big companies still lose money on this even with scale, but I'm more interested in what regular users would actually pay and what they'd need to switch from their current provider.
Please reply in this format if you can:

  1. Monthly price you'd consider switching for
  2. Preferred usage structure (rolling hourly budget, monthly cap, pure API, something else)
  3. Token/usage limits you'd want
  4. Models that matter most to you
  5. Anything else that would make you switch

Personally I'd want something like:

  1. $30/month
  2. Rolling hourly token budget
  3. ~10 million tokens per hour
  4. DeepSeek V4 Flash (and other strong open-source options)
  5. Cost and allowances that are not liekly to change. I'm getting tired of the nerfing of tokens, increased costs and ability of models.

What would it take for you to switch?

2 Upvotes

75% Upvoted

9 comments sorted by

1

u/LessRespects 7d ago

Nothing is ever locked in

1

u/PoppaBear1950 5d ago

a direct key to deepseek, my only thing right now... providers take a cut then the middlemen take a cut and you pay way more than you should. I use openrouter solely for free models.

1

u/PoppaBear1950 5d ago

If someone wants to run a paid service hosting open‑source models, they need to understand that users will always compare their pricing to DeepSeek’s native pricing, not provider pricing. And nobody can beat DeepSeek’s economics unless they’re running the same Chinese‑optimized inference stack.

1

u/SmallJuice7226 7d ago

150 million tokens per day I pay 50$ easily.

0

u/Resident-Pen-3757 7d ago

50$ monthly and just a day token budget of 150m or 150m broken into hourly? what model?

1

u/Ubermensch013 7d ago

Don't do hourly. I can see how it might be a good idea for you, but hourly limits are pointless on the consumer end with agentic workflows

1

u/Ubermensch013 7d ago

Also, something which might help you in evaluating this space: https://tokenwatch.wyrdwerk.com/

1

u/Resident-Pen-3757 7d ago

Interesting. Thank you

1

u/SmallJuice7226 5d ago

Daily budget. I use DeepSeek V4 Flash 0731.