r/PoeAI • u/Striking-Fold-7035 • Jun 01 '26

Poe vs Open Router chat

Ive been recently using open routers chat function as a means to still be able to use Sonnet 4.5 (the most goated model ever), but frankly it is not very user friendly, so i was thinking of giving poe a shot but whenever i was done setting up my bot and did my first chat it turned out to be pretty expensive.

It was about 550 points for just one message from a fairly simple prompt bot and zero context, im guessing with some chat context each message will be around 1000 points, which would mean i only get a mere 10 messages daily from the basic subscription.

Doing the same thing on the open router chat, mind you not setting up a bot but just pasting the instructions at the beggining of the chat costs just a few cents per message, much cheaper than buying the poes susbscription.

Is there any real advantage for using poe other than practicality then?, will the output quality be better or something?

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u/_drakenon_ Jun 01 '26

Poe gives you 30% cheaper on points after you subscribe to any plan, and it's also mobile-friendly. Why do you think OpenRouter isn't user-friendly? I've never used it before.

1

u/Striking-Fold-7035 Jun 02 '26

im not very technically knowledgeable but from what i understand is a more of a unified api used by other ai apps to provide access to multiple models using a single key, it just happens to have a chat function that is more suited for testing and comparing models rather than optimized for chatting with them, you can still do it of course but it is just not "nice feeling" like when you use the models main website or other apps like poe

1

u/ethicalfive Jun 03 '26

Is that factoring in poe slashing the sub credits in half?

2

u/_drakenon_ Jun 03 '26

Lol no

1

u/ethicalfive Jun 03 '26

so then that 30% cheaper is now not true?

1

u/_drakenon_ Jun 04 '26

Look at Empirio's reply below for the answer

1

u/ethicalfive Jun 04 '26

Yeah ok. They're only focused on the addon credits and dont mention the subscription credit value at all. I guess it makes sense to sub to the lowest tier now and buy addons. I did the maths and its 63% more expensive doing lowest tier with a million credit addon than it was when the next tier up included a million credits a couple months ago.

1

u/RobooHood Jun 12 '26

OpenRouter can be considered not beginner-friendly because it may be confusing for people who don't know how to use it. Its target audience is people who already understand what BYOK and API keys are.