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!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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

Under the circumstance where I'm looking for a "AI Gateway" (not sure why I would, but lets say) and at the same time I prefer to use EU businesses because it tends to be easier and more familiar.

What happens after the AI Gateway don't matter that much, since the whole purpose of the product seems to be about routing LLM inference requests, if it didn't do that, I don't think they'll have anything to sell in the first place :)