The provider is a massive issue. People moving off Claude tend to assume this is solved.

Claude's uptime is terrible. The uptime of most other providers is even worse...and you get all the quantization, don't know what model you are actually getting, etc.

OpenRouter and I'm toying around with Hermes. Seems good so far, but haven't really gotten into anything heavy yet. Though the "freedom" of not sweating the token pause and the costs not being too high is real.

Straight from them, but I know other providers like io.net can be faster but I like to directly support the project.