Yea I can believe all these. I've personally have been having issues on these points:
"200 OK, no answer" - insane that openrouter's main feature is literally a fallback and streaming doesn't support 200 no content to fallback to another provider or smth.
"rate-limit by IP"... now it kinda makes sense why deepseek v4.1 flash rate limits me on prod but never seems to happen on local. Makes you have to basically pin Deepseek as provider, since I've never had 429 error on them
hopefully this come in openrouter api cause I'm not signing up for a specific provider's specific api platform, and have yet another thing that can bill me.
They wont. This is OpenAI specific. They don't even have support for OpenAI realtime models.
However, this open source project https://github.com/chatbotkit/platform/ does and you can plug OpenRouter or OpenAI keys straight in while keeping your integration work generic. The only downside is hosting it yourself but it is just docker compose up.
Pretty basic ones, I got into AI images cause of that viral AI avatars thing that levelsio made 2-3 years back and have just been iterating on that idea(even though I think if I went into the AI text side of things, I'd have been much bigger at this point):
https://admakeai.com - Recently got this to 800 MRR , kinda trying to make it the main thing since the LTV on it is the highest. So if I could just figure out ads, this has the highest potential
https://aieasypic.com - First project that I made that made money from subs vs making money from ads, whole reason I continued to indiehack. Its kinda dying but core users still bring in 3-4k/mo , altho actual MRR is 1k/mo
https://bestphoto.ai - Made this after I got frustrated from the bad decisions I made on above, basically a tech rewrite + clone + simplification of aieasypic. Currently makes the most but at a lower margin than aieasypic. Not gonna say exact numbers, but lets say 5k+/mo
Also honestly if you have a thing that works, I'd say don't even share it. Its too easy to build a clone and start copying, which ofc was also possible a few years back but then it took actual effort and someone had to maintain it.
The only reason I'm sharing these is cause AI image generators are already like thousands in the market, so I mean if someone wants to go through the hell, I don't think its really that easy a market to succeed in anyways.
My personal benchmark for new models has been to compare video making skills with something like remotion. Usually reveals if they have any "taste" or outside the box thinking.
I'm starting to not trust any "benchmarks" when it comes to frontier models at least. As an example Sol feels the most "gets stuff done" but has zero taste, or any capability to surprise.
And for frontier models I go one step ahead and try to recreate a complex animation video, with the ability for the model to review its own work. And at this Fable is still the top one.
Ex: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uDAeAuYyl0E (recreation of Claude announcement video) and https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cSsVNtGPOIg (recreation of a fireship video). Sol did something similar but you can instantly tell its AI slop from very small things, and it just has no narrative or thought put into the writing.
And on creativity at least visually, Gemini 3.1 pro is somehow still up there. But its really hindered by its inability to use tool calls effectively or make a long term plan.
"200 OK, no answer" - insane that openrouter's main feature is literally a fallback and streaming doesn't support 200 no content to fallback to another provider or smth.
"rate-limit by IP"... now it kinda makes sense why deepseek v4.1 flash rate limits me on prod but never seems to happen on local. Makes you have to basically pin Deepseek as provider, since I've never had 429 error on them