daari vs OpenRouter¶
OpenRouter is a hosted marketplace (400+ models, one key, price/latency routing). daari is an on-device router. We do not clone the catalog. L6 can point at OpenRouter when you actually want the cloud.
| OpenRouter | daari | |
|---|---|---|
| Where it runs | Their API | Your localhost (or your cluster) |
| Default inference | Remote, billed | On-device $0 tiers first |
| Model choice | Marketplace + provider object | Task-aware local tiers, then one L6 slot |
| Privacy | Prompts leave the machine | Stay local until L6 |
| License | Hosted product | Apache 2.0 |
Pick OpenRouter when you want one key and many remote models.
Pick daari when the goal is not sending most Cursor / Claude Code turns to any remote model.
When a virtual key or team sets region_pin to us or eu and L6 is an
OpenRouter slot, daari rewrites the request to
https://us.openrouter.ai/api/v1 or https://eu.openrouter.ai/api/v1 (OpenRouter
in-region routing) instead of the global host. Non-OpenRouter slots still match
on the slot's configured region label only.
Stripe announced an OpenRouter acquisition (Aug 2026). That does not change daari’s job. Roadmap: ROADMAP-v3. Short matrix: compare.