Such initiatives are very much welcome and I am happy to to start using them. However, my issue is that it appears that many of these models are simply proxied from the specific cloud provider with fees attached which does not bring a lot of value given the 5% surcharge.

Since all frontier models are owned by US companies, I think better alternative is to focus on open source models only that run on EU data centers owned by EU companies. That will be something.

trying to get genuine zero data retention agreements is one of the most exhausting things to do because data retention policies are so opaque or non-existent.

aws, azure, cohere, mistral etc on here are all linked to generic privacy policies, it is impossible to tell what retention sla is in place.

to the credit of openrouter, they do state the data retention policies of almost all, but not all of their providers.

you can check the retention level for models on openrouter with the providers list. i was not able to find a retention policy for their plugin providers (exa and parallel). both log by default with enterprise opt in for zdr.

Under what circumstances would one pay a 5.5% premium so that an EU-built (but not EU hosted) routing layer could proxy to US/chinese model providers?

In a world where it enables you to tell your place of a work “just get us an account there so we have access to all models under a single billing account”.

In other words, it solves an organizational problem, not a technical one. That’s what the 5.5% is for.

Whether or not you prefer this or OpenRouter or one of the other LLM gateways is another discussion.

Practically, I think the premium only makes sense if the routing layer gives you something operational: one contract/invoice, EU support/legal process, spend caps, audit logs, maybe provider fallback. If it's just a pass-through to the same US/China model endpoints with +5.5%, I don't see much reason for devs to switch on price or sovereignty grounds.

I haven't looked at whether Eden does this, but Openrouter provides a number of these, and more. I go direct to the major providers, and use OpenRouter for the smaller ones because it saves me a lot of hassle.

If Eden provides a similar feature set, I'd certainly consider them.

Choice of models, including fully european, and the pay-as-you-go plan.

But OpenRouter also costs 5.5%: https://openrouter.ai/pricing

And? The point is that it's routed to the same model. Is the middleman's nationality that important, especially when you already accept the existence of a middleman?

If you're an EU business it's easier to do B2B with other EU businesses, just like it's easier for US businesses to do B2B with other US businesses. Not sure this is strange or out of the ordinary, I think it works the same in most places in the world today.

So important that you'd switch to another middleman at no additional cost over the middleman you're already using?

Probably for quite a few people.

This website doesn't even comply with general basic standards for imprint and responsible persons and firms behind it. So if i proxy this misbehaviour to the rest of the whole: european answer-claim ... and the nameservers are on cloudflare. goodbye.

Even their legal documents (terms of use, DPA, privacy agreement) just lists them as

    Eden AI
    France
    contact@edenai.co

The terms of use start with the words "Eden AI is a French company" but as far as I can tell there is no registered French company with that name. There is a likely unrelated British company of that name, and a French "Eden AI SAS" that was closed five months ago that helped companies create and execute workshops

Edit: looking more closely, it's the company orginally known as "Datagenius SAS" based in Lyon, France. They changed their name to "Eden AI SAS" in 2022 (or maybe it's an alternative name? I am not too familiar with how this works in France), and their datagenius homepage links to the submitted page. https://www.datagenius.fr/ If anyone wants to send them a letter, the registered address of the company is 142 Rue De Crequi, F-69003 Lyon

That took slightly more work to figure out than I would expect from a website that has the word "transparency" in the headline, but at least they do exist

It's not a German website, so it doesn't need an imprint

Out of curiosity, what are "general basic standards for imprint and responsible persons and firms behind it" ?

Identifying the legal entity behind the service. So you know who you're actually doing business with.

What I find interesting is that initially, I thought this was some low effort slop project, but apparently it has existed for 4 years already!

Will switch over. Despite the concerns others have mentioned if pricing is similar then I'll take the EU version even if it's only EU-ish

Title is misleading. The page (unless I missed it on a skim) states that it's built in Europe.

"European Alternative" has a different connotation as visible in the other comments.

Let's hope so, although, as others say, it should be more independent from foreign services if it is to be sold as fully EU-based.

didn't see any claims to being EU-based, just "built in Europe"

So it is, as required by law, compliant with the EU AI Act and GDPR? That would be an actual moat, otherwise most companies will probably not see the point. Why pay a EU middleman to non-EU services.

I think there are plenty of business cases where finance departments will rubber stamp European companies much easier than American ones, even if they do the same thing.

I don't think that's the case with this particular company. It's not clear who's running the show, it's not clear if they abide by any of the EU regulations, and their lack of proper documentation probably makes them more of a liability than an asset. Plus, for any of it to hold water, you'd need to set up all kinds of paperwork with the people providing the compute if you don't want to be just as impractical a partner as the American competitors.

The business model is still sound.

So, there is 0 differentiation from this and OpenRouter. The only difference is just that it is European in name only, but underlying services are not. And the pricing also isn't any cheaper. So, why would I spend my development hours switching to this than just stay on OpenRouter? Just because it's an "EU" alternative? The webpage doesn't even comply with basic GDPR requirements. Sigh.

Indeed; a "European" router serving mostly US models is (deliberately?) missing the point.

How come?

You can use it with just European models if you want.

If you think a routing service based in one country should only use the models from that country, I think you may be the one who is missing the entire point of a routing service in the first place.

yeah, why is it on the front page ? I can videcode it in 3 hours or maybe even less.

The European Alternative to Openrouter would be a simple open source proxy, not yet another proprietary service.

Is OpenRouter just a simple open source proxy? If not, how could that possibly be a relevant alternative for people using OpenRouter today?

OpenRouter is far more than a simple proxy.

How so? I haven’t tried it, I stick to one provider for my projects.

This is what happens when there is actual political pressure, need from society, and EU making big mission statements - and then there is silence. Random grifters and vibe coders will come up to fill the demand of unsuspecting masses with low quality or scam products with an EU sticker on it. Or even the wolf in sheep costume, like aws.eu

I tested for a week, it is working fine.

Eden AI is a solid product and it’s good that there are alternatives to OpenRouter out there.

We don’t brand ourselves as such, but if you’re looking for a European OpenRouter alternative focusing on media models (image, video etc.), I‘ve built that with https://lumenfall.ai

> You pay providers directly. We charge nothing extra.

How is it sustainable?

We have direct relationships with providers and get volume discounts.

Besides that, we‘ll introduce paid plans with additional features like observability soon.