You are absolutely allowed to expose access to end users, as long as you continue to abide by terms of service. We have hundreds, if not thousands, of apps built on openrouter that in turn have end users of their own. We showcase many of them on our /apps ranking page!

TOS says: access the Site or Service for purposes of reselling API access to AI Models or otherwise developing a competing service;

So yes obviously you can do what you want as long as you abide by terms of service, but the terms of service does NOT allow you to resell the API.

> you aren't allowed to expose the access to end users, it has to be for internal usage only,

> TOS says: access the Site or Service for purposes of reselling API access to AI Models or otherwise developing a competing service;

I think what you meant is "you aren't allowed to expose the access to the API to end users", which is a fair condition IMHO.

You're still allowed to expose the functionality (ie. build a SaaS or AI assistant powered by OpenRouter API), just don't build a proxy.

To be clear, I like Openrouter and recommend it to many people (I don't aim to "shit on it").

It does talk about a competing service, if I build a service that propose all the image gen models of Openrouter, and charge the user for it per token, am I allowed?

I was actually wondering about this since I've seen like 3 comments talking about the same thing, would it happen to be related to money laundering due to the availability of the crypto payment method?

The comments are all from the same author.

OpenRouter recently started enforcing account-level regional restrictions for providers that enforce it (OpenAI, Anthropic, Google) - ie blocking accounts that look like they are being used by users in China. The regional restriction used to be based on the Cloudflare edge worker IP's geolocation and enforced upstream, so a proxy/server running inside of supported regions would get around the geoblocks, but now OpenRouter are using (unspecified) signals like your billing address to geoblock. People say "banned" because the error message says "Author <provider> is banned", which really should be read as "Unable to use models from provider due to upstream ban".

Which further strengthen the fact that you can't do anything you want with API keys, even if you pay for them.

there is a huge gap between 'doing whatever you want' and 'illegal activities' as well as upstream restrictions (out of openrouters control)