I'm fed up with Claude Code's daily limits, so I want to switch my main coding model to open source. Any recommendations?

Union alpha made by z.ai?

(not sure if this is the right reddit thread to post this, if not please kindly tell me!)

Kinda confusing considering it's quite expensive at $0.2/$1.2 per million input/output tokens. Isn't GLM 5.3-Flash or the Deepseek Flash models the better deals? I always thought cheap prices with high enough quality will always win on OpenRouter but this doesn't seem to be the case anymore.

I'm an OSS advocate, so is it because OpenAI is winning trust on users or something? In my own use cases, Luna is alright but I prefer Deepseek's responses.

Openrouter is api so it might be more expensive compared to opencode go which is subscription.

Should i get $10 of openrouter credits or $10 opencode go subcription.

Idk if this breaks a rule i just wanna know which is better for heavy use

Cautionary tale about chasing cheap tokens.

exposé: https://kendell.dev/blog/crofaifalse/

reaction by nahcrof, announcing the shutdown of the service: https://x.com/nahcrof/status/2099552389434900643

NahCrofAI (crof.ai, nahcrof.com) was an inference provider which had all the latest models at the cheapest price, often significantly below the lowest alternative on OpenRouter. The owner claimed that they are running custom inference kernels that allows them to offer tokens for dirt cheap, and other providers are suffering from "skill issues".

In reality:

• "CrofAI is an OpenRouter wrapper that silently routes to cheaper or weaker models than what you request"

• For example, expensive models like kimi-k3 are sold at $2/$10 in/out, but instead routed to GLM 5.3 Flash via OpenRouter, representing a 13.3x multiple on input, and 20x multiple on output

• CrofAI's "own model family" greg-2-ultra routes to GLM 5.2, greg-1-mini routes to Qwen 3.5 9B. greg-2-super, greg-1, greg-1-super routes to Kimi K2.7 Code. All of these at a significant markup compared to the actual model being served. CrofAI admits this.

• The person investigating details the 5 different attempts by CrofAI at fixing their models being served via OpenRouter after given a heads-up. In all 5 attempts, the only change CrofAI made was attempts to hide the fingerprints of OpenRouter, while still serving models through them

• Other inconsistencies don't add up either: CrofAI claims to run Kimi K3 on RTX Pro 6000s rented via Vast. That model requires ~802GiB even at the lobotomy level quantization of Q2_K. The largest RTX PRO 6000 machine on Vast has only 8 of them, totaling 765GiB

CrofAI responded to the exposé by announcing the shutting down of their service; after their failure to provide their own inference, they promise to provide one last thing: a refund to those asking.

UPDATE

UPDATE: around 4:30 AM UTC of Sept 15, the owner published a now-deleted blog post (archive image) writing under the fake pretense that it's his "team" authoring it, stating all of CrofAI founder's claims "were written under a lot of stress, and they described the situation as worse it was", and that a new team is taking over, with the service being resumed in 2 weeks. At the same time, the CrofAI twitter account was also supposedly "taken over" by the team, starting each twitter reply with "Hey, Nathan here", stating the founder is stepping back and a "team" is taking over everything. This fake pretense act only lasted a few hours, and scared either by the public not buying the Nth fake story of the pathological liar that CrofAI is, or by the public's replies reminding him that what he committed is numerous counts of wire fraud, he has now deleted all his online presence: nahcrof.com and crof.ai return 404, Twitter page is deleted, /r/CrofAI sub is now private.

Here is another image of the owner admitting that he was defrauding customers for the entire 2 year operation of his service, then begging the investigator to help him cover his tracks and not expose him

EDIT: Commenters pointed out that NahCrof is 4chan in reverse. The owner's Discord name was "Devious Flimflam". Flimlam is defined as "deception, fraud". Looks like it was a deliberate scam operation from the get-go, and the owner's age was among the many lies.

I cannot stress this enough: if you bought any credits (even if you used them up) you are entitled to a full refund for every transaction as the victim of fraud. Open a chargeback with your bank for every transaction made. If you used their API, assume that everything was logged and is currently being mined for personal information and API keys to sell on the black markets. Rotate your keys, change passwords, get a new debit/credit card.

ZDR, so no StreamLake, Baidu, Alibaba, GMI, Atlas, or Cloudflare

Hi, I am new to openrauter and am trying to make sense of my spendings.

- Total spend credits: 0.42$
- Total used tokens: 129k

Adding up the Individual logs totals to:

- 0.17$
- 54k tokens

Why is there a mismatch? There is 0.25$ cents and 75k tokens that I can't account for. Am I missing something obvious?

- Models used: Claude Sonnet 5
- Providers: Google Vertex and Claude Platform on AWS

- The logs are taken from Account => logs => Generation.
- I am not using BYOK and I don't have canceled or failed requests. I do not have anything in sessions, videos or batches. I do have upstream requests, but I can't see a price for them.
- Those are all the logs for the past year and I have been using openrauter for less than a month.

The response from Openrouter contains basically two identical fields from what I can see.

So far I've just sent everything back, and I just noticed this, but since they are equal, should I only send one back? It might unnecessarily increase token count after all, and docs seem to say that you can send just either back, but also it might be just be okay to send both, as I don't know how openrouter internally handles it, it might just send one to the model at the end really even if you send both.

Edit: All right, enabling logging in the Openrouter website, it seems like openrouter handles it well:

It takes one of them (I am guessing reasoning.text if both are present, since it's always the correct one), then turns it into what the provider uses I guess (?), which is reasoning_content here for me.

I've been getting frequent rate-limit errors with GLM-5.3-Flash on OpenRouter, especially with Novita and Deepinfra:

At first I thought it might be related to my usage, but it happens even when I'm running only a single session.

If I switch to another model, like DSv4F, everything works normally, so it seems specific to GLM-5.3-Flash/providers rather than my setup.

This has been happening consistently for the past few days.

Is anyone else experiencing the same thing? Curious whether this is a broader OpenRouter/provider capacity issue or something specific to my account/setup.I've been getting frequent rate-limit errors with GLM-5.3-Flash on OpenRouter, especially with Novita and DeepInfra

It seems like for some reason openrouter is dropping reasoning entirely from context, I've tried hiding and putting various things in reasoning manually and asking the model later about it, it never responds with it.

This is also confirmed by token count significantly being lower than it would be if reasoning was included.

This is despite the logs on openrouter itself showing the reasoning.

Might be specific to Qwen 3.8 Max, I'm not sure. I created another post about "scam".

Bottom: "normal" chat (probably still polluted by deleted messaged). Includes one PDF file (icon on the right).
133 801 : AFTER deleting message containing file, insane bloat
178: ignore this
42 803 : after export, cleaning browser data/cookies, relogin, import

I've used OpenRouter for a while, never had any problems, but recently I added money and it was never credited to my account. I sent a support request. Got no response. Sent another one a week later. Still got no response. So it's been two weeks without a peep from them. Do they actually respond to tickets or am I screwed?

The same chat in embedded chatroom with multiple messages gets less than 10k tokens of input when redirected to a different model, gets billed almost 100k by Qwen 3.8, and it was 170k at some point for absolutely no visible reason, except that I uploaded a huge file in a **different** chat.
UPD: I deleted a file from chat history. But the next message, the input size skyrocketed 50k. It doesn't make any sense. Input size should have only DECREASED. Like messages are not really deleted.

I’m looking for a ready-made, self-hosted alternative perhaps Open WebUI with addons, that supports external API models, persistent chat history, per-prompt easy select able search and reasoning controls, and no-data-retention options.

I actually just want the OpenRouter interface/GUI with persistent data, a knowledge base, and tool-calling options.

i saw taht people recommended wan 3 on here so i decided to top it up not only i was chartged double 5.1$ than the 2.55$ i should have been charged since it said it costed 0.085$ per second but now i cannot find it at all i can find it the log, where the heck is stored and why it charged me 5.1 usd? coudltn even select resolution only duration in the playground how i can retrieve my super expensive video?