We Read 100 OpenClaw Issues About OpenRouter. Here's What We Built Instead.

OpenRouter is the most popular LLM aggregator. It's also the source of the most frustration in OpenClaw's issue tracker. The Data We searched OpenClaw's GitHub issues for "openrouter" and read every result. 100 issues. Open and closed. Filed by users who ran into the same structural problems over and over. Category Issues Examples Broken fallback / failover ~20 #22136 , #45663 , #50389 , #49079 Model ID mangling ~15 #49379 , #50711 , #25665 , #2373 Authentication / 401 errors ~8 #51056 , #34830 , #26960 Cost / billing opacity ~6 #25371 , #50738 , #38248 Routing opacity ~5 #7006 , #35842 Missing feature parity ~10 #46255 , #50485 , #30850 Rate limit / key exhaustion ~4 #8615 , #48729 Model catalog staleness ~5 #10687 , #30152 These aren't edge cases. They're structural consequences of how OpenRouter works: a middleman that adds latency, mangles model IDs, obscures routing decisions, and introduces its own failure modes on top of the providers it aggregates. 1. Broken Fallback — The #1 P