OpenRouter
Independent gateway · 5.5% on tokens · BYOK 5% · checked Sep 23, 2026
What it costs on real workloads
| Model | Direct | Through OpenRouter |
|---|---|---|
 Claude Sonnet 5 | $400.00 | $422.00vs $400.00 direct |
 GPT-6 Sol | $400.00 | $422.00vs $400.00 direct |
 Gemini 3.8 Flash | $150.00 | $158.25vs $150.00 direct |
 DeepSeek V4.1 Flash | $27.00 | $28.48vs $27.00 direct |
100M input and 20M output tokens a month, paying with gateway credits.
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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Sources: each gateway's own pricing page and docs, read by hand and fetched again every Monday. List prices: your contract may differ. Logos via logo.dev; trademarks belong to their owners.