Daily tracking of model usage on OpenRouter, compressed into one question: which labs are gaining real developer demand, and at what price?
Volume and revenue are two clocks. Cheap, good-enough open-weight models are taking token volume first — inside the very apps that still pay Western frontier labs for the dollars. Volume leads; revenue lags. The migration is already underway.
The gate: a Chinese token lists ~6.6× cheaper, so revenue follows volume slowly — China would need ~87% of all volume for half the dollars. Watch price per token, not just share.
Chinese-origin models crossed Western ones in usage share. The crossover chart, the gainers, and the price mechanism behind it.
Who's taking whose lunch — cross-vendor substitution and the upgrade treadmill inside each lab.
The app leaderboard and vendor-concentration risk: which products drive each lab's volume.
Supporting material: method, raw dashboard, long memo.