Hacker News

by Ryan Harman

Eden AI – European Alternative to OpenRouter (edenai.co)

57 points by muzzy19 3 hours ago

swiftcoder 42 minutes ago

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?

embedding-shape 16 minutes ago

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 :)

stingraycharles 27 minutes ago

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.

alexmercerdev 39 minutes ago

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.

rolandm 18 minutes ago

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

raincole 17 minutes ago

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?

embedding-shape 15 minutes ago

Havoc 14 minutes ago

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

reneberlin 3 hours ago

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.

wongarsu 41 minutes ago

Even their legal documents (terms of use, DPA, privacy agreement) just lists them as

    Eden AI
    France
    [email protected]
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

ascorbic an hour ago

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

RadiozRadioz an hour ago

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

PufPufPuf 41 minutes ago

Identifying the legal entity behind the service. So you know who you're actually doing business with.

stingraycharles an hour ago

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!

_pdp_ an hour ago

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.

mhitza an hour ago

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.

WhatsName 14 minutes ago

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.

databasa 2 hours ago

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.

muyuu an hour ago

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

poisonborz 41 minutes ago

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

nubg an hour ago

The European Alternative to Openrouter would be a simple open source proxy, not yet another proprietary service.

embedding-shape 13 minutes ago

Is OpenRouter just a simple open source proxy? If not, how could that possibly be a relevant alternative for people using OpenRouter today?

neya 2 hours ago

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.

mft_ an hour ago

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

k__ 34 minutes ago

How come?

You can use it with just European models if you want.

embedding-shape 12 minutes ago

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.

m00dy an hour ago

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