Comparison
Frontière vs OpenRouter: the jurisdiction question
OpenRouter and Frontière solve different halves of the same problem, and on price OpenRouter usually wins. OpenRouter, Inc. is a New York company that routes each request to whichever provider in its pool bids lowest, across a catalog far larger than ours — on a commodity model like Llama 3.3 70B its floor price is roughly €0.087 ($0.10) per million input tokens against our €1.26. What it cannot change is which government can compel it: a US-incorporated company answers to a US court order under the CLOUD Act, wherever the compute physically runs. Frontière is a French company routing to EU providers with no non-EU capital control, labeling the jurisdiction of every model before you call it, and storing no prompts at all. If cost per token is your only criterion, use OpenRouter. If you have to answer for where your data can be compelled, that is a question about corporate control, and it is the one we are built around.
Side by side
Every row below comes from the other side's own published pages, checked on 2026-08-06 and linked at the end of this section — not from a third-party comparison.
| Criterion | Frontière | OpenRouter |
|---|---|---|
| Operating company | FLEECE AI SASU | OpenRouter, Inc. |
| Headquarters | France | New York, United States |
| Governing law | French / EU law | State of New York |
| US CLOUD Act exposure | None on the 12 sovereign models (EU companies, no non-EU control) | Yes — US-incorporated company, regardless of where inference runs |
| How the catalog works | Curated catalog, 13 models live, each pinned to a named provider | Router across a large pool of third-party providers, price-driven |
| Llama 3.3 70B, per 1M tokens (in / out) | €1.26 / €1.26 | €0.087 ($0.10) / €0.277 ($0.32) |
| Prompt storage | Never stored — only token counts and the amount charged | OpenRouter's own retention is not stated in its privacy docs; downstream provider policies vary and are filterable |
| Jurisdiction visible per model | Yes — sovereign / fast access, on the card and in the API response | Per-provider data-policy table, and provider filters you set yourself |
OpenRouter's figure is the floor of a pool: the request goes to whichever provider bids lowest under the filters you set, so the effective price and the data policy both depend on who serves it that day.
Prices published in USD, shown converted at 1 USD = 0.8655 EUR (rate of 2026-08-05) alongside the original figure. Frontière publishes in EUR, margin included — the amount actually debited.
Sources, checked on 2026-08-06: openrouter.ai — Llama 3.3 70B · openrouter.ai — privacy & logging · openrouter.ai — terms
Where OpenRouter is the better choice
- A far larger catalog, including closed frontier models we do not serve at all.
- Usually cheaper per token on commodity open-weight models — sometimes by an order of magnitude, because the pool floor is set by whoever is discounting hardest that week.
- Automatic fallback across providers when one is down, which we do not offer: our models are each pinned to one named provider.
- EU in-region processing is available on an enterprise plan, on request — worth asking about if data location, rather than corporate jurisdiction, is what your policy requires.
Where Frontière is the better choice
- The operating company is French. There is no US parent, licensee or affiliate through which a US order could reach your data on the sovereign tier.
- Every model carries its jurisdiction before you call it, in the catalog and in the API's own response — you never have to reconstruct who served a given request.
- API prompts and completions are never written to our database — only the token counts billing requires. The web console is the one exception, and it is opt-in: conversations stay in your browser unless you sync a thread.
- The price you read is the price you are billed, on a named provider, with no per-request variance to reconcile later.
How to choose, concretely
The two are not mutually exclusive, and for most teams the honest answer is to use both:
- Regulated, personal or client data — anything a DPO signs off on: pick the tier where corporate jurisdiction is settled, not just the region.
- Volume experimentation, evaluation sweeps, hobby projects, closed frontier models: the cheaper, broader pool wins and the jurisdiction question usually does not arise.
- If you only remember one rule: data-centre location is a geography question, and a subpoena is a corporate-control question. Answer the second one first.
FAQ
Is OpenRouter GDPR-compliant?
GDPR compliance and US jurisdictional reach are two different questions, and passing one does not answer the other. OpenRouter documents EU in-region processing for enterprise customers on request, which addresses data location. It does not change the fact that OpenRouter, Inc. is a New York company and therefore subject to US legal process under the CLOUD Act — that is a question about who controls the company, not about where the servers are.
Is Frontière cheaper than OpenRouter?
Usually not, and we are not going to pretend otherwise. On Llama 3.3 70B, OpenRouter's pool floor is around €0.087 ($0.10) per million input tokens against €1.26 on Frontière. We route to a small set of named EU providers and add a fixed margin; a router that auctions each request across dozens of providers will beat that on commodity models most of the time.
Can I use OpenRouter and Frontière together?
Yes, and it is often the right architecture. Both expose an OpenAI-compatible endpoint, so the only thing that changes between them is base_url and the key. Sending regulated workloads to the sovereign tier and everything else to the cheapest pool is a reasonable split — and it is easier to justify to a DPO than one blended vendor.
Does OpenRouter let me control which provider serves my request?
Yes. OpenRouter publishes a per-provider table showing retention and training practices, lets you disable providers that train on prompts account-wide, and lets you restrict an individual request to providers meeting a given data policy. The difference is one of default: on Frontière each model is pinned to one named provider and its jurisdiction is stated up front, so there is no routing decision left to configure.
See what we actually serve
Thirteen models live, each with its publisher, licence, hosting jurisdiction and real price.