We built open OpenRouter that turns usage into a better model
Get picks like this daily. Today's launch numbers, the top launches, AI and tech news, and a daily opportunity pick, straight to your inbox.
Want to reach these readers? Sponsor an issue.
Hi HN, we built an open source model gateway. It's a single place to manage our own self hosted, frontier, and open source models in one place.It’s is rust native, built for concurrency, and implements all the config quirks across models and providers (streaming formats, tool calls, model parameters, rate limits, and different error behavior).The gateway adds under 1 ms for BYOK requests and under 2 ms when Experiential supplies the provider key. It has every major inference provider, and 1000+ models refreshed daily via a codex agent that opens a PR.Compared to other similar projects we’re open source, take no markup, allow you to mix local models with a marketplace, and use your traffic to (opt in) train you a model. Simple routing doesn’t warrant a 10% token markup.The way we do this is given standardized OTel traces, we mine representative real tasks, use text world models to simulate rollouts for various models, apply an LLM judge, and fit a nearest neighbor classifier on top of an embedding of a prompt to decide the optimal model for each request. Usually this can map out a better pareto curve on cost/quality than just calling single models but it’s not perfect.Using these simulations we can also do things like suggesting cache hit optimizations, new model suggestions, and training models.It’s open source, so you can deploy it on your own infrastructure, use our hosted version with 0 markup, or read how we design for maximum availability on our website.
HN · launched Aug 27, 2026 · 222 upvotes (top 3%) · 0 views
Niche: llm routing and gateway tools · 143 launches, 5 in the last 7 days ▼ -62% · Explore this niche →
Category and tags
- Horizontal
- Model & infra
- Developer
- AI-native
- Commercial product
Visit website ↗ Source listing ↗
More like this: all 143 launches in llm routing and gateway tools →
Could you build this?
Partial Building an API proxy/router in Rust for model orchestration is straightforward, but setting up the automated pipeline that uses production telemetry to reliably train and continuously improve a better model requires ML engineering.
What it would actually take: The proxy itself is an asynchronous Rust service using Axum/Tokio to route requests, normalize payloads across LLM providers, and collect prompts/completions into a structured warehouse (e.g., ClickHouse). The hard part is the self-improving flywheel: automated data cleaning, synthetic evaluation/filtering, and continuous LoRA/full-weight fine-tuning pipelines using PyTorch and orchestration frameworks (Ray/Kubernetes). Requires ML engineers experienced in RLHF, instruction tuning, and production gateway infrastructure.
Discussion
20 comments analyzed.
Competitors mentioned: OpenRouter, LiteLLM, Bifrost, ngrok AI gateway, vLLM Semantic Router
Concerns raised: Telemetry enabled by default (misleading documentation), UI only available in hosted version, not in GitHub repo, Claude's verbose token output, Unclear differentiation from existing model routers, Potential rug-pull/suspicious business model
Feature requests: Model switching within existing sessions, Better handling of conversation branching with dynamic context, Integration with cloud provider encryption for training data
Competitors
Other products that read as similar to this one : 352 launches clear the similarity bar, closest 8 shown.
Attention rank: #27 of 353 (itself plus its competitors, highest first, normalized so YC and Product Hunt are compared fairly).
Launched 299 days after the earliest competitor.
- Millwright · hn · 2026-07-22 · 10 upvotes · similarity 0.54
- Open-source model routing for coding agents at Astra-level performance · hn · 2026-09-30 · 119 upvotes · similarity 0.53
- Smart model routing directly in Claude, Codex and Cursor · hn · 2026-06-26 · 216 upvotes · similarity 0.51
- model-router · github · 2026-09-24 · 8 upvotes · similarity 0.50
- UsingOpen · ph · 2026-09-26 · 2 upvotes · similarity 0.46
- GoModel · hn · 2026-04-21 · 217 upvotes · similarity 0.46
- Langfuse AI Gateway, open source rust gateway to trace every LLM call · hn · 2026-11-13 · 9 upvotes · similarity 0.46
- LLM-Gateway · hn · 2026-03-27 · 7 upvotes · similarity 0.44
The niche, labels, vibe code rating and competitor comparison on this page are analysis by Nicheloom. If you use them, please credit nicheloom.com. How you may use our data.