Probe0 vs OpenRouter
OpenRouter is a hosted gateway your requests travel through on the way to a provider. Probe0 is a local LLM proxy that sits on your Mac between your AI coding agent and whatever it was already calling, and tries to make some of those calls cheaper or unnecessary before they leave the machine.
A hosted, OpenAI-compatible gateway and marketplace that gives you one key and one bill for hundreds of models across dozens of providers.
| Feature | Probe0 | OpenRouter | Edge |
|---|---|---|---|
| Where your prompts go | Stay on your Mac. No Probe0 server exists. | Pass through their hosted infrastructure on the way out. | Probe0 |
| Model catalogue | Whatever your coding agents already call, plus local models. | Hundreds of hosted models across dozens of providers, one key. | Competitor |
| Setup for one developer | One proxy and one certificate, once. Claude Code, Codex and Cursor all route through it. | One API key, wired into each client or app separately. | Probe0 |
| Local model routing | Sends work to a model already running in Ollama or LM Studio, retries weak answers on the cloud. | No native local-model support. It proxies to registered hosted providers. | Probe0 |
| Cost of a repeat call | Exact cache hit on local disk. Never touches the network. | Passes through each provider's own prompt cache, with sticky routing to raise hit rates. | Probe0 |
| Reuse across similar prompts | Local vector index, strict similarity floor, refuses to match anything carrying tool calls. | None. Reuse is whatever the chosen provider's cache gives. | Probe0 |
| Working with no network | Cache hits and local models keep answering. | Hosted gateway. Nothing resolves without a connection. | Probe0 |
| Cost attribution | Local ledger down to which process made the call, with real cost and latency. | Hosted dashboard, activity feed, OpenTelemetry export to Grafana or SigNoz. | Probe0 |
| Spend controls | Hard cap per run and per day. Warns, then pauses the run. | Per-key credit limits and org guardrails, strictest rule wins. | Even |
OpenRouter's catalogue is the real thing: one key gets you hundreds of hosted models across dozens of providers, with new models and price changes appearing without you doing anything. For a developer running coding agents on a Mac all day, though, catalogue breadth is not the bill. The bill is the same handful of models being called over and over by Claude Code, Codex and Cursor, and Probe0 is aimed at exactly that traffic. Setup is one local proxy and one certificate installed once, after which every agent CLI on the machine routes through it with no per-tool configuration. Nothing about that requires a Probe0 account server, because no Probe0 server exists.
Each module switches on and off independently and reports what it saved. Local Routing sends work to a model already loaded in Ollama or LM Studio and retries weak answers on the cloud. Model Tiering tries the cheap model first and escalates only when the answer is not good enough. The exact cache lives on local disk. The semantic cache uses a local vector index with a strict similarity floor and refuses to match anything carrying tool calls, because a wrong hit there corrupts an agent run rather than just handing back a stale paragraph. Request coalescing collapses simultaneous identical calls into one upstream. Spend Guard is a hard cap per run and per day: it warns, then actually pauses. Recording keeps model, tokens, real cost, latency and which process made each call, which is also how it can tell you when you are paying for a plan tier above what you use.
The difference that matters is what happens to a request that never needs to be made. A hosted gateway makes a call cheaper by routing it well, but the request still leaves your machine and still crosses the gateway. A cache hit on Probe0 costs nothing and never goes over the network, and a prompt answered by a model already loaded in Ollama never reaches a provider either. Prompt bodies stay on the machine by default, and so does the ledger of what your agents did. The limits are worth stating plainly: Probe0 is macOS only and in private beta, sign-in is Google or GitHub, there is no team deployment, and provider coverage is what coding agents call rather than a 100-plus catalogue.
The verdict
If you are shipping a product on top of models, or running a team that needs one bill and governance over who spends what, OpenRouter is the answer and Probe0 is not. For the developer this page is written for, one Mac, several coding agent CLIs, a bill climbing every week, I would run Probe0: it removes calls instead of routing them, keeps prompts and the cost ledger on the machine, and stops the run at a hard cap rather than emailing about it. The two also stack, since Probe0 will sit in front of an OpenRouter key just as happily as anything else.
Questions
- Is Probe0 an OpenRouter alternative?
- Only for one use case: cutting the cost of AI coding agent traffic on a single developer machine. Probe0 does not give you a catalogue of hundreds of hosted models or cross-provider failover, so if that is what you want from OpenRouter, Probe0 does not replace it.
- Can I use Probe0 and OpenRouter together?
- Yes. Probe0 is a local LLM proxy sitting between your coding agents and whatever endpoint they call, so if your agent is pointed at OpenRouter, Probe0 still handles caching, local routing, coalescing and spend caps before the request goes out.
- Does OpenRouter support local models like Ollama?
- Not natively. OpenRouter routes to its own registered hosted providers and has no mechanism to reach a model running on your machine, so local LLM routing has to come from your client or from a local proxy like Probe0.
- Which one gives better LLM cost control?
- OpenRouter has more granular controls for teams: per-key credit limits, org guardrails and consolidated budgets. Probe0 goes further on a single machine by removing calls entirely through local caching and local model routing, and by pausing a run at a hard daily or per-run cap.