OpenRouter
Independent gateway · 5.5% on tokens · BYOK 5%
Unverified
What it costs on real workloads
| Model | Direct | Through OpenRouter |
|---|---|---|
| $400.00 | $422.00vs $400.00 direct | |
| $400.00 | $422.00vs $400.00 direct | |
| $150.00 | $158.25vs $150.00 direct | |
| $10.50 | $11.08vs $10.50 direct |
100M input and 20M output tokens a month, paying with gateway credits. A dash: not on its model list.
Carries 264 of the models tracked here, from its own model catalog, checked Nov 9, 2026.
About OpenRouter
Hosted API that routes requests to hundreds of models from many providers through one OpenAI-compatible endpoint and a prepaid credit balance.
- Fee on tokens
- 5.5%
- Pricing model
- Provider prices passed through; 5.5% fee on card credit purchases (5% crypto)
- Bring your own key
- 5% fee, first $25K a month free
- Entry plan
- Standard (pay-as-you-go)
- Hosting
- Hosted
Features stated: Fallbacks, Caching, Observability, Budgets, OpenAI-compatible, Bring your own key. Not stated: Load balancing, Guardrails, Rate limits, Prompts, Data residency, Private networking.
The terms, in their words
- Markup
- No markup on provider token prices; fee is charged on credit purchases: 5.5% by card ($0.80 minimum), 5% by crypto. Pricing page lists platform fee 5.5% (Standard) and 8% (Business).
- Bring your own key
- $25,000 of list price inference per month with no fees, 5% fee after (Enterprise: $200,000/month with no fee, 5% after); fee is 5% of what the same model and provider would normally cost on OpenRouter
- Free tier
- Free plan: 25+ free models, 4 free providers; 50 free-model requests per day without purchased credits, 1000 per day with at least $10 in credits
- Providers
- 500+ models, 80+ providers
- Card payments: 5.5% ($0.80 minimum); Crypto payments: 5%
- We pass through the pricing of the underlying providers without any markup
- Usage above the allowance has a fee of 5% of what the same model and provider would normally cost on OpenRouter.
Source: openrouter.ai/pricing
OpenRouter is an American artificial intelligence routing service provider that operates a platform for accessing and routing requests to large language models and other generative artificial intelligence models.
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