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 :)
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.
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.
And? The point is that it's routed to the same model. Is the middleman's nationality that important, especially when you already accept the existence of a middleman?
If you're an EU business it's easier to do B2B with other EU businesses, just like it's easier for US businesses to do B2B with other US businesses. Not sure this is strange or out of the ordinary, I think it works the same in most places in the world today.
This website doesn't even comply with general basic standards for imprint and responsible persons and firms behind it. So if i proxy this misbehaviour to the rest of the whole: european answer-claim ... and the nameservers are on cloudflare. goodbye.
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
So it is, as required by law, compliant with the EU AI Act and GDPR? That would be an actual moat, otherwise most companies will probably not see the point. Why pay a EU middleman to non-EU services.
Such initiatives are very much welcome and I am happy to to start using them. However, my issue is that it appears that many of these models are simply proxied from the specific cloud provider with fees attached which does not bring a lot of value given the 5% surcharge.
Since all frontier models are owned by US companies, I think better alternative is to focus on open source models only that run on EU data centers owned by EU companies. That will be something.
This is what happens when there is actual political pressure, need from society, and EU making big mission statements - and then there is silence. Random grifters and vibe coders will come up to fill the demand of unsuspecting masses with low quality or scam products with an EU sticker on it. Or even the wolf in sheep costume, like aws.eu
So, there is 0 differentiation from this and OpenRouter. The only difference is just that it is European in name only, but underlying services are not. And the pricing also isn't any cheaper. So, why would I spend my development hours switching to this than just stay on OpenRouter? Just because it's an "EU" alternative? The webpage doesn't even comply with basic GDPR requirements. Sigh.
If you think a routing service based in one country should only use the models from that country, I think you may be the one who is missing the entire point of a routing service in the first place.
Under what circumstances would one pay a 5.5% premium so that an EU-built (but not EU hosted) routing layer could proxy to US/chinese model providers?
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 :)
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.
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.
But OpenRouter also costs 5.5%: https://openrouter.ai/pricing
And? The point is that it's routed to the same model. Is the middleman's nationality that important, especially when you already accept the existence of a middleman?
If you're an EU business it's easier to do B2B with other EU businesses, just like it's easier for US businesses to do B2B with other US businesses. Not sure this is strange or out of the ordinary, I think it works the same in most places in the world today.
Will switch over. Despite the concerns others have mentioned if pricing is similar then I'll take the EU version even if it's only EU-ish
This website doesn't even comply with general basic standards for imprint and responsible persons and firms behind it. So if i proxy this misbehaviour to the rest of the whole: european answer-claim ... and the nameservers are on cloudflare. goodbye.
Even their legal documents (terms of use, DPA, privacy agreement) just lists them as
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 workshopsEdit: 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
It's not a German website, so it doesn't need an imprint
Out of curiosity, what are "general basic standards for imprint and responsible persons and firms behind it" ?
Identifying the legal entity behind the service. So you know who you're actually doing business with.
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!
So it is, as required by law, compliant with the EU AI Act and GDPR? That would be an actual moat, otherwise most companies will probably not see the point. Why pay a EU middleman to non-EU services.
Such initiatives are very much welcome and I am happy to to start using them. However, my issue is that it appears that many of these models are simply proxied from the specific cloud provider with fees attached which does not bring a lot of value given the 5% surcharge.
Since all frontier models are owned by US companies, I think better alternative is to focus on open source models only that run on EU data centers owned by EU companies. That will be something.
Title is misleading. The page (unless I missed it on a skim) states that it's built in Europe.
"European Alternative" has a different connotation as visible in the other comments.
The European Alternative to Openrouter would be a simple open source proxy, not yet another proprietary service.
Is OpenRouter just a simple open source proxy? If not, how could that possibly be a relevant alternative for people using OpenRouter today?
Let's hope so, although, as others say, it should be more independent from foreign services if it is to be sold as fully EU-based.
didn't see any claims to being EU-based, just "built in Europe"
This is what happens when there is actual political pressure, need from society, and EU making big mission statements - and then there is silence. Random grifters and vibe coders will come up to fill the demand of unsuspecting masses with low quality or scam products with an EU sticker on it. Or even the wolf in sheep costume, like aws.eu
So, there is 0 differentiation from this and OpenRouter. The only difference is just that it is European in name only, but underlying services are not. And the pricing also isn't any cheaper. So, why would I spend my development hours switching to this than just stay on OpenRouter? Just because it's an "EU" alternative? The webpage doesn't even comply with basic GDPR requirements. Sigh.
Indeed; a "European" router serving mostly US models is (deliberately?) missing the point.
If you think a routing service based in one country should only use the models from that country, I think you may be the one who is missing the entire point of a routing service in the first place.
How come?
You can use it with just European models if you want.
yeah, why is it on the front page ? I can videcode it in 3 hours or maybe even less.