title: Comparison — provider × pattern description: "One row per provider and product, one column per credential pattern. Generated from the front-matter of each provider page, so a new provider is one Markdown file rather than a table edit." lead: "One row per provider and product, one column per pattern. This table is generated at build time from the patterns: front-matter on each provider page — the hand-written version of it drifted the moment a second provider appeared." order: 30 provenance: commit: 7d1916aca5f3 date: 7 September 2026

{{comparison}}

Read down the columns

Column 0 is the same everywhere: possible, and never acceptable. It is in the table because "the browser can call it" is what people usually mean by "client-side", and CORS permitting a call says nothing about whether the credential is bounded {{claim:cors-browser}}.

Column 1 is where the two providers part company. OpenRouter can mint a key with a spend limit and a reset window, so a key in a page has a blast radius you chose. ElevenLabs cannot: scoping restricts what a key may call, never how much it may spend {{claim:no-per-key-spend-limit}}. There is no product configuration that makes column 1 available for ElevenLabs text to speech, which is why the row says ✗ rather than "not recommended".

Column 2 needs a server, and the question is whose. For ElevenLabs Agents the vendor runs the minter — you hand it your key and it issues a 15-minute signed URL {{claim:agents-only-signed-urls}}. For ElevenLabs text to speech there is no such endpoint, so the minter would be ours to build, host, secure and pay for. "Available with a server" and "available" are not the same claim, and the last column of the table says which.

Column 3 is the one this estate can extend to any provider by adding a verb to the host bridge and a terms file to .vault/. It is shipped for the model router and specified for the voice API↗ {{claim:sg-tts-spec}}. It is the site's actual argument: a browser application can use a paid API without ever holding the key, because the host holds it and enforces the terms.

How to add a provider

Write one Markdown file in content/providers/ with a patterns: block in its front-matter, and this table grows a row. No template surgery, no edit to this page:

patterns:
  - provider: Some Vendor
    product: The specific product, because a vendor is not one auth story
    server: "Yes — ours"
    p0:
      verdict: never
      note: "why, in six words"
    p1:
      verdict: yes
      note: "the bound, named"
    p2:
      verdict: no
      note: "no vendor minter for this product"
    p3:
      verdict: spec
      note: "" 

verdict is one of yes · no · never · spec · na. The OpenRouter page↗ on this site exists as the proof: it is a stub of the sibling site's content, carrying nothing but front-matter and a short body, and it is where the second and third rows of the table above come from.

This document is released under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International licence (CC BY 4.0).