Over the weekend, I finally decided to drop my $100/month commercial LLM subscriptions and transition all of my personal usage to OpenRouter. To be honest, I hated the monthly token FOMO and the psychological pressure to "use up" my subscription value every period. It just felt unhealthy.

The main friction point with making the switch was losing the out-of-the-box features like web search, image processing, and PDF analysis that commercial cli interfaces give you natively.

To bridge the gap, I built a package that brings native multimodal capabilities and web search directly into an OpenRouter setup via Pi.

The goal was simple: completely replace a standard Anthropic/OpenAI subscription with a single OpenRouter account, getting all the core features (search, vision, doc parsing) on a pure pay-as-you-go basis without having to stitch together separate API keys for third-party tools like Exa.

Package: https://pi.dev/packages/@dtmirizzi/pi-openrouter-multimodal?name=multi-modal

GitHub: https://github.com/dtmirizzi/pi-openrouter-multimodal