AI Gateway
OpenRouter
OpenRouter's hosted gateway routes one OpenAI-compatible API to 500+ models from 80+ providers, with provider fallback, per-key credit limits, workspaces, guardrails, and data-policy routing. Tokens bill at provider list price from prepaid credits, with a fee on credit purchases. Stripe agreed to acquire OpenRouter on August 19, 2026.
The 30-Second Take
Pick OpenRouter if you want many models behind one key and one bill, and would rather pay a fee than run a gateway.
One API and one prepaid balance reach hundreds of models, at each host's list price plus a 5.5% fee on Standard credits. Stripe agreed to acquire it in August 2026, with no close announced by late October.
- Best fit
- Teams that want many models behind one key and one bill, and would rather pay a fee on credits than run a gateway.
- Main constraint
- Quality, latency, and features vary by host for the same model, and SSO, SCIM, and IP allowlists need Enterprise.
- First move
- Create a workspace with capped keys and a guardrail that allowlists the hosts you have tested for each model.
Why
Watch the hosts: the same model scores differently by host, so production traffic needs a tested allowlist. Descript moved three direct integrations to one OpenRouter connection, while Olly went down after pinning hosts with fallbacks off.
Practitioner sentiment, all practitioners+10 Mixed
100 practitioners, 110 sources reviewed, Updated Oct 30, 2026How this is measured
Read the GILD Review
Save a product your organization uses.Keep up with OpenRouter without adding it to your stack.Visit Website
- Operating stack
- AI Application Platform
Comparisons
How does OpenRouter compare with the alternatives?
OpenRouter vs Portkey
- AI Gateways
A cache change on Portkey's hosted cloud took a production platform down in 2025, and SRVpress left OpenRouter over slowness and errors in 2026. Pick OpenRouter to buy 500+ models through one balance with a fee on credits; pick Portkey, now Palo Alto Networks' Prisma AIRS AI Gateway, for recorded logs and a VPC data plane on your own keys.
OpenRouter vs DeepSeek API
- AI Gateways
Route DeepSeek's open weights through OpenRouter when data must stay out of China or needs Zero Data Retention routing, and test each host. Buy from DeepSeek directly for its cache discounts when its data terms are acceptable.
OpenRouter vs LiteLLM
- AI Gateways
Rent OpenRouter when a 5.5% fee on credit purchases costs less than operating a gateway. Run LiteLLM when prompts must stay in your network and you can staff it.
Operator Insights
What are teams learning from building on OpenRouter and running it in production?
Aleks MistratovHead of AI ProductDescript
Descript's video editing agent, Underlord, which runs on frontier models from Anthropic, Google, OpenAI, and xAI.
OpenRouter blog, published Read the case study (opens OpenRouter blog in a new tab)
Observation
Descript moved its Underlord editing agent from three direct model integrations to one OpenRouter connection and runs 13 models from four developers in production.
- Takeaway
- Consolidate model access when evaluating new models slows you down more than integrating them. Set host order and data policy per model and choose each route yourself.
- What happened
- Descript maintained separate integrations with OpenAI, Anthropic, and Google and wrote its own fallback logic between them, so each new model waited for an engineer. With OpenRouter as its production inference layer, it sets host order per model from OpenRouter's throughput, uptime, and cost data, routes only to hosts within its data retention policy, and configures 3 to 4 automated fallbacks per model. It keeps a direct Anthropic connection outside production for early-access models.
“Production went from three direct integrations to one connection through OpenRouter.”
OpenRouter - Vendor customer story
- Team metrics reported
Deployment details
Descript's video editing agent, Underlord, which runs on frontier models from Anthropic, Google, OpenAI, and xAI.
- Vendor customer story
- Team metrics reported
- Team
- Descript AI product (Underlord agent)
- Workload
- Underlord, Descript's video editing agent
- Model
- 13 models from Anthropic, Google, OpenAI, and xAI as of August 2026
- Measurement
- New-model evaluation from 1 week or more to 1 to 2 hours; 3 to 4 automated fallbacks per model
Mo MoustafaFounderOlly
Olly, an AI assistant in iMessage that has carried over 18 million messages, about a third on open models through OpenRouter.
mmoustafa.com, published Read the write-up (opens mmoustafa.com in a new tab)
Observation
OpenRouter's per-host benchmarks, reported by Olly's founder, scored the same DeepSeek weights 90% on GPQA at DeepSeek and 75% at another host, and Olly went down after pinning three hosts with fallbacks off.
- Takeaway
- Choose hosts by the benchmark closest to your workload and keep fallbacks on, because a hard filter also shrinks the pool OpenRouter can fall back to.
- What happened
- Olly routes open models such as DeepSeek V4 Flash through OpenRouter. OpenRouter's per-host board showed first-party DeepSeek at 90% GPQA and 81% TAU-Bench Airline, against 75% and 58% for DigitalOcean on the same weights, and in July one host carried about 20% of Olly's DeepSeek traffic and 92% of its empty completions. Filtering hosts by declared precision did not predict quality. Pinning the model to three hosts with fallbacks off took Olly down within two weeks as those hosts rate limited or stopped serving it.
- Public engineering write-up
- Measured results reported
Deployment details
Olly, an AI assistant in iMessage that has carried over 18 million messages, about a third on open models through OpenRouter.
- Public engineering write-up
- Measured results reported
- Team
- Olly, run by its founder
- Workload
- Over 18 million assistant messages, about a third on open models through OpenRouter
- Model
- DeepSeek V4 Flash 0731 and other open models
- Measurement
- GPQA 90% and TAU 81% first-party against 75% and 58% at DigitalOcean (Sep 7, 2026); 92% of empty completions from one host carrying about 20% of traffic (July 2026)
Buying and deployment
What a team building on it should verify before production traffic grows.
Sourced from OpenRouter documentation
Signals
What is the current evidence saying about OpenRouter?
A current read of what teams and individual developers report publicly about routing model calls through OpenRouter, with each finding linked to its sources.
Practitioner sentiment, all practitioners
+10 Mixed net
of 101 sources that take a side, each author counted once.
How this figure is madeTeams and leaders have 11 accounts; GILD prints their sentiment from 20.
Current sentiment
Positive, mixed and negative sources
413030
The score counts them as 40 positive, 30 mixed and 30 negative votes, one per author.
Across 101 counted sources the read is mixed: 41 positive, 30 mixed, and 30 negative. Fees and billing surprises are raised in 20 sources and host quality variance in 16, while 16 of the 24 who describe production use run OpenRouter in production.
Run a pilot on one service's model traffic to measure added latency, failed fallbacks and how closely its spend records match each provider's bill.
Evidence field. All 110 sources, one mark each.
Arrange by
Each mark is one source: positive, mixed, negative, no opinion stated, or documentation (not counted).
| Group | Sources | Positive | Mixed | Negative | No opinion stated and not counted in the score | Documentation, checked and not counted |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Positive | 41 | 41 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| Mixed | 30 | 0 | 30 | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| Negative | 30 | 0 | 0 | 30 | 0 | 0 |
| Not counted | 1 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 1 | 0 |
| Documentation | 8 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 8 |
| Quarter | Sources |
|---|---|
| Q1 2025 | 1 |
| Q2 2025 | 2 |
| Q3 2025 | 1 |
| Q4 2025 | 3 |
| Q1 2026 | 4 |
| Q2 2026 | 14 |
| Q3 2026 | 45 |
| Q4 2026 | 32 |
| Documentation, checked | 8 |
By sentiment
8 documentation pages check facts and are not counted.
Hover a mark for a quick look, click it or press Enter to open its source.Tap a mark to open its source, then step to its neighbors with Previous and Next.
What practitioners praise
Top praise of 3. Each mark is a source on it; filled marks praise it.
Most common concerns
Top concern of 4. Each mark is a source on it; filled marks raise it.
All 110 sources behind these findings
- Pricing and plan comparisonOpenRouter (Official), Product documentation, checked Oct 28, 2026
- EnterpriseOpenRouter (Official), Product documentation, checked Oct 28, 2026
- Provider routingOpenRouter (Official), Product documentation, checked Oct 28, 2026
- Model fallbacksOpenRouter (Official), Product documentation, checked Oct 28, 2026
- Zero Data RetentionOpenRouter (Official), Product documentation, checked Oct 28, 2026
- GuardrailsOpenRouter (Official), Product documentation, checked Oct 28, 2026
- LogsOpenRouter (Official), Product documentation, checked Oct 28, 2026
- LimitsOpenRouter (Official), Product documentation, checked Oct 28, 2026
- Comment on: GPT-6.1 Terrasnvzz, Hacker News commenter (self-described: Testing a new model under a ZDR requirement), Hacker News comment, published Oct 27, 2026
- Comment on: Root shell on Samsung TVRoark66, Hacker News commenter (self-described: Benchmarks against local inference), Hacker News comment, published Oct 27, 2026
- Comment on: Genie 4alex_sf, Hacker News commenter (self-described: Trying new models), Hacker News comment, published Oct 27, 2026
- My setup: GPT-6.1 Terra, Claude Opus 5.5, DeepSeek V4.1 Flash, Qwen 3.8 Flash via OpenRouter.AI Penguin, AI routing account that audits its own setup (self-described: A self-run refusal test on owned hardware), X post, published Oct 27, 2026
- OpenRouter has all these models ending in :free. Can I just use them forever?AMPM-AIOPS, AI builder running an agent business in public (self-described: Agents on free models), X post, published Oct 27, 2026
- from the user side it doesn't feel like low demand, it feels like rate limitsdrumst0ck, open-source developer (self-described: Pi coding sessions), X post, published Oct 27, 2026
- So many enterprises and customers are in for a surprise if TPS and cost are the only thing they optimize for when choosing an inference provider.Gaurav, inference engineer at SpaceXAI (self-described: Inference provider selection), X post, published Oct 27, 2026
- Comment on: Anthropic S-1nozzlegear, Hacker News commenter (self-described: Local models for daily coding, with OpenRouter on demand), Hacker News comment, published Oct 26, 2026
- Do you mean that openrouter is not passing full potential of model?Michal, X user (self-described: OpenCode tasks through OpenRouter), X post, published Oct 25, 2026
- Stopped using OpenRouter for same reason, slowness & errors.Jay Brunet, System Admin and Developer at SRVpress (self-described: SRVpress), X post, published Oct 25, 2026
- i tried running debug with ai - heres the findings:in-void, r/openrouter member (self-described: An app calling a free Qwen model), Reddit comment, published Oct 22, 2026
- Lazy-Loading Reasoning Chunks in Documedic CDSSSubhendu Das, builder of Documedic (self-described: Documedic, a clinical decision support system whose backend generates recommendations through the OpenRouter API), DEV Community post, published Oct 22, 2026
- 4 months, no coding background, solo, my desktop app that sends one prompt to 16 AI models went live todaygeorgos_pappas, founder of BYSELF in Dubai (self-described: BYSELF, a desktop app that sends one prompt to up to 16 models), Reddit post, published Oct 21, 2026
- Coding setupgabrielgbs97, r/openrouter member (self-described: Coding with GitHub Copilot and Kilo Code in VS Code), Reddit post, published Oct 20, 2026
- My first test on Openrouter was to use PiPar-Bench, which is chat related benchmark.mvaranka, r/openrouter member (self-described: Chat benchmark across six models for the PiPar app), Reddit comment, published Oct 19, 2026
- Top up OpenRouter creditAhmed Elghareeb, maintainer of tradeHalalLLM (self-described: tradeHalalLLM, a trading assistant whose every cycle runs on GLM-5.2 through OpenRouter), GitHub issue, published Oct 18, 2026
- I built a free tool to track real-world OpenRouter LLM token usage, provider market share, and API costsChippytime_com, developer who built LLM Radar at chippytime.com (self-described: LLM Radar, which reads OpenRouter's public token and price data), Reddit post, published Oct 18, 2026
- Openrouter call hangs indefinitelyZe-hs, maintainer of TextFlow-Translate (self-described: TextFlow-Translate, which translates text in chunks through OpenRouter), GitHub issue, published Oct 18, 2026
- My account shows -$563??Ronin_Spect, r/openrouter member (self-described: A personal account with about US$15 of credit), Reddit post, published Oct 16, 2026
- Our tool told a customer their contract does not auto-renewMysterious-Bison3735, backend developer at a two-person company selling a contract question tool (self-described: A B2B contract question tool with all model calls through OpenRouter), Reddit post, published Oct 15, 2026
- Provider GMICloud is spoofing models and inflating tokensmoral3jo, r/openrouter member (self-described: DeepSeek V3.2 pinned to one provider), Reddit post, published Oct 15, 2026
- llm: switch the DM model to Haiku 5.5, audit and plan (issue #633)Garblesnarff, maintainer of the Infinite Realms app (self-described: Infinite Realms, a game whose production DM model runs through OpenRouter with fallback models), GitHub issue, published Oct 14, 2026
- built a self hostable ai support bot with an inbox and i love itShakaLaka_Around, developer of the momo support bot (self-described: momo, a self-hosted support bot on Docker Compose), Reddit post, published Oct 14, 2026
- For me spending 10$ on openrouter then using the free models with Pi harness is working fine.Andrew_C0, r/openrouter member (self-described: Guided coding on free models with the Pi harness), Reddit comment, published Oct 13, 2026
- What is pi harness and how do i use it?Top-Royal5255, r/openrouter member (self-described: Free models after a US$10 credit purchase), Reddit comment, published Oct 13, 2026
- Comment on: Show HN: HarmoNova: A modern, customizable Hacker News reader for Chromechaosmanage, author of HarmoNova (self-described: HarmoNova's AI summaries, which run on the user's own OpenRouter key), Hacker News comment, published Oct 11, 2026
- I had something similar happen today when trying to get z-ai/glm-5.3-flash to reorganize a 200ish KB wiki.m477m, r/openrouter member (self-described: Reorganizing a 200 KB wiki with GLM 5.3 Flash), Reddit comment, published Oct 7, 2026
- LLM Food Recognition in Production: What Shipping soba Taught MeMaksim Danilchenko, builder of the soba iOS app (self-described: soba, an iOS app that estimates carbs from meal photos, with every recognition call routed through OpenRouter), DEV Community post, published Oct 5, 2026
- Guys, did you see the inference price war for open weight models in openrouter?Xiaoyin Qu, founder of agentsky (self-described: Open-weight inference prices), X post, published Oct 4, 2026
- I noticed Claude Code uses its models silentlyAccomplished_Fixx, r/openrouter member (self-described: Claude Code pointed at Qwen models on OpenRouter), Reddit post, published Oct 3, 2026
- Somehow, I am in debtcraterIII, r/openrouter member (self-described: Prepaid OpenRouter credits), Reddit post, published Oct 3, 2026
- Has anyone else had endlessly nonsense output from Open Inference? (GLM 5.3 Flash / DeepSeek V4.1 Flash)icandela, r/openrouter member (self-described: Agent tasks on cheap open models), Reddit post, published Oct 2, 2026
- I built an Android app that warns me before I run out of OpenRouter credits (BYOK, no account)AltruisticAd1286, maker of an OpenRouter credit-monitor app for Android (self-described: A few small projects on OpenRouter credits), Reddit post, published Sep 30, 2026
- OpenRouter stream interruptionJaeho Cho, maintainer of the jaehho/dotfiles agent setup (self-described: Claude Code sessions routed through OpenRouter), GitHub issue, published Sep 29, 2026
- I spent $100+ in 3 weeks on OpenRouter (vs. $33/month for Claude)UranusSeizure, r/openrouter member (self-described: Personal coding use after leaving a Claude subscription), Reddit post, published Sep 29, 2026
- Beatstack - a local-first Mac app for planning a screenplay, no account and no cloudTextAveryAI, maker of Beatstack (beatstack.io) (self-described: Beatstack, a local-first screenplay planning app), Reddit post, published Sep 28, 2026
- Would love this. Don't even need a wide range of models.BotDitya, builder at Piqoid (self-described: Piqoid, using open models through OpenRouter), X post, published Sep 28, 2026
- OpenRouter presets (@preset/...) always show $0 cost in Cline CLIalexnsolo, Cline CLI user (self-described: Cline CLI with OpenRouter presets), GitHub issue, published Sep 23, 2026
- I got tired of paying monthly for AI wrappers, so I built a BYOK desktop companion.info_breaker, developer of the Nib desktop companion (self-described: Nib, a Windows AI companion that runs on the user's OpenRouter key), Reddit post, published Sep 20, 2026
- I built a Chrome extension 'K-TL;DR' that summarizes any article in your own language, launching on Product Hunt todaykrzychuman, solo founder of the K-TL;DR Chrome extension (self-described: K-TL;DR, a summarizer extension with a free daily quota), Reddit post, published Sep 17, 2026
- I built an AI assistant you use entirely by email. No app, no account, no login.newzinoapp, developer who built the Penpal email assistant (self-described: Penpal, an AI assistant that answers by email, with a paid tier), Reddit post, published Sep 16, 2026
- Setting Up Pi With DeepSeek V4.1 Flash on OpenRouterVincent Schmalbach, software developer building vroni.com (self-described: Pi with DeepSeek V4.1 Flash on OpenRouter as a fallback when Codex and Claude Code limits run out), Personal blog post, vincentschmalbach.com, published Sep 16, 2026
- Comment on: So you want to use OpenRouter?alexcz, Hacker News commenter (self-described: Structured output across providers), Hacker News comment, published Sep 11, 2026
- Comment on: So you want to use OpenRouter?_ink_, Hacker News commenter (self-described: OpenClaw agent on OpenRouter), Hacker News comment, published Sep 11, 2026
- Comment on: So you want to use OpenRouter?CubsFan1060, Hacker News commenter (self-described: A personal API key with a US$10 daily limit), Hacker News comment, published Sep 11, 2026
- Comment on: So you want to use OpenRouter?joshstrange, Hacker News commenter (self-described: Small personal OpenRouter use), Hacker News comment, published Sep 11, 2026
- Comment on: So you want to use OpenRouter?bakugo, Hacker News commenter (self-described: Meta-provider routing in general), Hacker News comment, published Sep 11, 2026
- Comment on: So you want to use OpenRouter?Macha, Hacker News commenter (self-described: Personal use with GLM 5.3 and GLM 5.3 Flash), Hacker News comment, published Sep 11, 2026
- Comment on: So you want to use OpenRouter?mesmertech, Hacker News commenter (self-described: DeepSeek V4.1 Flash in a production app), Hacker News comment, published Sep 11, 2026
- Comment on: So you want to use OpenRouter?maeln, Hacker News commenter (self-described: Development and model testing), Hacker News comment, published Sep 11, 2026
- Comment on: So you want to use OpenRouter?miki123211, Hacker News commenter (self-described: Model evaluation and quick integrations), Hacker News comment, published Sep 11, 2026
- Comment on: So you want to use OpenRouter?nhecker, Hacker News commenter (self-described: Personal OpenRouter keys with spend limits), Hacker News comment, published Sep 11, 2026
- Comment on: So you want to use OpenRouter?artursapek, Hacker News commenter (self-described: A production app with direct provider integrations), Hacker News comment, published Sep 11, 2026
- Comment on: So you want to use OpenRouter?Aurornis, Hacker News commenter (self-described: OpenRouter as one access point to specific providers), Hacker News comment, published Sep 11, 2026
- Comment on: So you want to use OpenRouter?arjie, Hacker News commenter (self-described: Quick iteration across providers beside an own router for on-prem models), Hacker News comment, published Sep 11, 2026
- Comment on: So you want to use OpenRouter?svachalek, Hacker News commenter (self-described: Provider choice on OpenRouter), Hacker News comment, published Sep 11, 2026
- Comment on: So you want to use OpenRouter?habosa, Hacker News commenter (self-described: A production product with about 10 allowlisted providers and a few frontier models), Hacker News comment, published Sep 11, 2026
- Comment on: So you want to use OpenRouter?Gracana, Hacker News commenter (self-described: Provider choice on OpenRouter), Hacker News comment, published Sep 11, 2026
- Comment on: So you want to use OpenRouter?jeremyjh, Hacker News commenter (self-described: Policy controls across providers), Hacker News comment, published Sep 11, 2026
- So you want to use OpenRouter?Simon Willison, author of Simon Willison's Weblog and creator of the LLM tool (self-described: Link-blog note on Olly's write-up about host variance), Personal blog post, simonwillison.net, published Sep 11, 2026
- Tired of paying 50 bucks/mo for cold email SaaS tools, so I built a 3.3MB native Windows desktop app powered by DeepSeek & VisualNEO Win (Free & Open Source)luissinlios, developer of LeadHunter AI Desk (self-described: LeadHunter AI Desk, a local Windows outreach app on the user's OpenRouter key), Reddit post, published Sep 10, 2026
- Comment on: DeepSeek launching v4.1 flash cheaper and more capable than v4 proiamjs, Hacker News commenter (self-described: DeepSeek V4 Flash through OpenRouter), Hacker News comment, published Sep 9, 2026
- I built Juice: A fully open-source, browser-based AI coding agent (Uses AI Studio & OpenRouter)Own-Transition-1595, developer of the Juice coding agent (self-described: Juice, a browser-based coding agent on the user's own keys), Reddit post, published Sep 8, 2026
- So you want to use OpenRouter?Mo Moustafa, founder of Olly (self-described: Olly, an iMessage assistant with over 18 million messages, about a third on open models through OpenRouter), Engineering blog post, mmoustafa.com, published Sep 7, 2026
- DeepSeek V4 Flash across 14 providers: cost, speed and cachingBatuhan Aktas, author of inference.academy (self-described: A controlled benchmark of DeepSeek V4 Flash across 14 routes, including OpenRouter's automatic routing; dated by its Hacker News post of Sep 7, 2026), Benchmark write-up, inference.academy, published Sep 7, 2026
- Comment on: Can I opt out of my input or output data being used for training?evanjrowley, runs the autolith coding setup (self-described: Qwen 3.8 Max on OpenRouter inside autolith, with Claude Code reviewing commits), Hacker News comment, published Sep 6, 2026
- Model routing with OpenRouter and DeepSeek to cut costs without losing qualityRamón Chancay, software engineer at Desarol (self-described: A production model-routing setup with DeepSeek for bulk traffic and Claude for hard cases), DEV Community post, published Sep 5, 2026
- Comment on: GPT-6 Astrasimonw, creator of the LLM command-line tool and its llm-openrouter plugin (self-described: Testing new models from the command line), Hacker News comment, published Sep 4, 2026
- pi: OpenRouter finish_reason:"error" is never retried, kills the turnhaiderking1, Pi user (self-described: Pi coding agent sessions through OpenRouter), GitHub issue, published Sep 2, 2026
- Preserve OpenRouter actual cost, cost details, BYOK flag, and serving providerasiraky, Pi user (self-described: Pi coding agent sessions through OpenRouter), GitHub issue, published Sep 1, 2026
- [FEATURE] Honor provider-reported cost (usage.cost) from LLM gateways (OpenRouter, LiteLLM, Manifest)guillaumegay13, OpenCode user (self-described: OpenCode sessions routed through LLM gateways), GitHub issue, published Aug 21, 2026
- [BUG] OpenRouter prompt caching misses because Zoo does not send cache session affinitynavedmerchant, Zoo Code user (self-described: Multi-turn Claude coding tasks in Zoo Code through OpenRouter), GitHub issue, published Aug 18, 2026
- LiteLLM: OpenRouter Integration and Fallbacks ConfigurationArseny Zinchenko, DevOps engineer and RTFM author (self-described: A company rollout of OpenRouter behind LiteLLM, with OpenAI as the fallback), Engineering blog post, RTFM, published Jul 31, 2026
- Comment on: Kimi K3, and what we can still learn from the pelican benchmarkcsomar, builder of codeinput.com's SVG generator (self-described: An SVG generation playground that calls models with the user's OpenRouter key), Hacker News comment, published Jul 17, 2026
- Comment on: Migrating a production AI agent to GPT-5.6: 2.2x faster, 27% cheaperznnajdla, Hacker News commenter (self-described: Production agent harnesses), Hacker News comment, published Jul 13, 2026
- Comment on: Kimi K2.7 Code is generally available in GitHub Copilotsummarity, Hacker News commenter who works at GitHub (self-described: OpenRouter models inside the Copilot CLI and app), Hacker News comment, published Jul 2, 2026
- Ditching Claude for OpenCode and OpenRouterIan Wootten, developer and builder of n3ws.dev and despeech.com (self-described: Three side projects built in June 2026 with OpenCode and DeepSeek V4 Flash on OpenRouter), Personal blog post, ianwootten.co.uk, published Jul 1, 2026
- Comment on: AI DevOps Engine, bot posts PR fixes after testing in network-isolated Dockerlandry-77, builder of the AI DevOps Engine (self-described: A PR-fix bot that generates patches through OpenRouter with data collection denied on every request), Hacker News comment, published Jun 24, 2026
- Comment on: Openrouter Fusion APIdsl, builder of a Fusion MCP server on OpenRouter (self-described: A panel-of-experts MCP server built on OpenRouter before OpenRouter's own Fusion launched), Hacker News comment, published Jun 15, 2026
- Hosting OpenClaw: a money trap and two silent failuresAdrien Cossa, runs an OpenClaw press-review bot on a Hetzner VPS (self-described: An OpenClaw Signal bot using OpenRouter with a BYOK OpenAI key), DEV Community post, published Jun 10, 2026
- Vibe-coding shareable, infinitely scalable personal appsSimon Mayes, software engineer and founder of Untether (self-described: Two backend-free personal apps that call OpenRouter through its OAuth PKCE flow), Personal blog post, type2fun.net, published Jun 6, 2026
- Comment on: Open Code Review, An AI-powered code review CLI tooljayphen, builder of the Coducky code review app (self-described: Coducky run on the 50-PR Martian benchmark with Qwen 3.7 Plus through OpenRouter), Hacker News comment, published Jun 6, 2026
- Built a recruiting SaaS because recruiters kept pitching me Java jobs (I don't write Java)... launched this week, looking for feedbackSingularSyzygy, developer who built jobquisitor.com (self-described: jobquisitor.com, a recruiting SaaS that scores CVs against job descriptions with LLM calls), Reddit post, published Jun 3, 2026
- A weekly tool-use test is the only signalMirza Iqbal, n8n Ambassador and enterprise automation consultant (self-described: A weekly pass-or-fail tool-use test across OpenRouter's free models), DEV Community post, published Jun 1, 2026
- Comment on: OpenRouter raises $113M Series Bmichaelbuckbee, Hacker News commenter (self-described: Production AI work across providers), Hacker News comment, published May 31, 2026
- The mysterious Hy3 LLM is topping OpenRouter Model Rankings by a large marginMax Woolf, author of Max Woolf's Blog (self-described: Reading OpenRouter's public model rankings), Personal blog post, minimaxir.com, published May 26, 2026
- Comment on: DeepSeek makes the V4 Pro price discount permanentadi_pradhan, Hacker News commenter (self-described: DeepSeek V4 Flash and Pro through OpenRouter), Hacker News comment, published May 24, 2026
- Apple Silicon costs more than OpenRouterWilliam Angel, author of the Offline Agentic Coding series on williamangel.net (self-described: Comparing a local M5 MacBook Pro with OpenRouter for the same open models), Personal blog post, williamangel.net, published May 17, 2026
- How I built a secure AI voice journal with AES-256 and Mistral, but hit a wall on monetization.Drownambitions, developer of the iListen Android voice journal (self-described: iListen, an AI voice-first journal for Android), Reddit post, published May 11, 2026
- LLM routing per tier via OpenRouter, when one model doesn't fit allsm1ck, builder of HoneyChat (self-described: HoneyChat, an AI companion product routing each tier's calls through OpenRouter), DEV Community post, published Apr 21, 2026
- Reallocating $100/Month Claude Code spend to Zed and OpenRouterkisamoto, developer and braw.dev author (self-described: Personal coding setup: Zed Agent and Claude Code on OpenRouter credits, ZDR endpoints only), Personal blog post, braw.dev, published Apr 6, 2026
- Comment on: Openrouter Going Rogue?_kulang, Hacker News commenter (self-described: Development and chat use), Hacker News comment, published Mar 29, 2026
- Comment on: Tell HN: Litellm 1.82.7 and 1.82.8 on PyPI are compromisedchillfox, Hacker News commenter (self-described: Personal and side-project model access), Hacker News comment, published Mar 24, 2026
- I built an AI listing optimizer for Etsy/Amazon sellers and just hit my first paying usersMiddle_Piano_4655, developer of Selloquence (self-described: Selloquence, a listing optimizer with paying users), Reddit post, published Feb 15, 2026
- I built a tool that turns plain English into fully-researched and source-cited structured datasetsHelpful_Style_147, developer who built Ampsheet (self-described: Ampsheet, a research tool that builds cited datasets with parallel agents), Reddit post, published Feb 12, 2026
- Comment on: Kagi AssistantsVHRanger, Hacker News commenter (self-described: A consumer assistant with its own privacy policy), Hacker News comment, published Nov 20, 2025
- Comment on: Ask HN: Who is hiring? (November 2025)kylewongpg14, posting for Kilo Code (self-described: Kilo Code, an open-source coding agent ranked #1 on OpenRouter with 4.9 trillion tokens a month), Hacker News comment, published Nov 3, 2025
- OpenRouter drops fees in response to Vercel's AI GatewayJos van der Westhuizen, Coplay (self-described: Coplay, a Unity AI assistant company that follows model usage on OpenRouter), Company blog post, Coplay, published Oct 11, 2025
- Price swings on OpenRouter might surprise youAlex Ellman, author of the Price Per Token newsletter (self-described: Daily scrapes of OpenRouter's model prices since July 28, 2025), Newsletter post, Price Per Token, published Aug 19, 2025
- 3 Months of Kilo Code: from Zero to Top 3 on OpenRouterJustin Halsall, first hire at Kilo Code (self-described: Kilo Code, an open-source coding agent whose usage is ranked on OpenRouter), Company blog post, Kilo Blog, published Jun 5, 2025
- RubyLLM 1.3.0: Smarter Attachments, Multi-Tenancy, and No More Manual Model TrackingCarmine Paolino, creator of RubyLLM (self-described: RubyLLM, an open-source Ruby library that added OpenRouter as a provider), Personal blog post, paolino.me, published Jun 3, 2025
- Breaking Free from AI Subscriptions: Cost-Effective All-in-One Solution with OpenRouterPH Saurav, software engineer at CodeChemist (self-described: Coding chat in Neovim through OpenRouter, replacing Copilot and Tabnine subscriptions), DEV Community post, published Mar 15, 2025
Mar 2025 to Oct 2026.
102 sources from practitioners, by month and sentiment.
Where It Fits
Where does OpenRouter belong in the stack?
OpenRouter is Core across Model, supports Operate, and touches Build, Data, and Evaluate.
- Business area
- Product & Engineering
- Function
- Software Development
- Operating stack
- AI Application Platform
- Primary role
- Hosted AI Gateway & Model Router
Model
Model APIs: Supports
Model APIs, supports. OpenRouter bills provider tokens at list price from its own credits, so a team needs no account with each model maker. The models, their direct APIs, and early-access releases stay with the providers.
Model gateway: Core
Model gateway, core. This is OpenRouter's primary role: one API key routes to 500+ models with provider ordering, allowlists, and fallbacks, while per-key credit limits, workspace budgets, and guardrails control spend from the Standard plan.
Build
Orchestration: Touches
Orchestration, touches. LangChain, Mastra, PydanticAI, and the Vercel AI SDK call OpenRouter as a model provider. A framework such as LangGraph controls the agent's steps.
Tool use: Touches
Tool use, touches. A hosted MCP server lets Claude Code, Codex CLI, and Cursor read OpenRouter's model, price, and credit data. The tools an agent calls run elsewhere.
Data
Retrieval: Touches
Retrieval, touches. OpenRouter routes embedding and rerank models and offers a Files API, but it stores no search index. Retrieval stays with a vector database or search product.
Evaluate
Evaluation: Touches
Evaluation, touches. Broadcast sends request traces to Braintrust, LangSmith, and Langfuse, where datasets and scoring live.
Operate
Observability: Supports
Observability, supports. The Logs page records each generation with its model, provider, cost, latency, and the member whose key made it. Activity charts spend and volume on every plan. Agent-step tracing stays with an observability tool.
Cloud deployment: Touches
Cloud deployment, touches. OpenRouter has no self-hosted edition. Capacity comes from its providers, or from your own keys and Private Endpoints on Enterprise, and in-region routing to EU or US providers needs Business or Enterprise.
Guardrails: Supports
Guardrails, supports. OpenRouter Guardrails protect against prompt injection and jailbreaks, detect or redact sensitive information, and apply custom regex content filters to incoming requests.
Market mapThe layers OpenRouter covers, and who else owns each one.
Model gateways & routing
Model APIs
Observability & tracing
Guardrails & AI security
- Prisma AIRS
- NeMo Guardrails
Orchestration & agent frameworks
4 more layers on the full map. Core, Supports and Touches describe coverage. They say nothing about quality.
Models
Which models run in OpenRouter?
The current releases GILD tracks that public sources record running in OpenRouter. Each model's page charts its public benchmark scores.
- Claude Fable 5.1Claude Fable release for demanding reasoning and long-horizon agentic work, with stronger agentic coding, multistep research, and document, spreadsheet, and slide work.
- Claude Haiku 5.5Anthropic's small model for high-volume, latency-sensitive tasks such as classification, extraction, and routing. API model claude-haiku-5-5, 1M-token context.
- Claude Opus 5.5A Claude Opus release for complex agentic, coding, and professional work.
- Claude Sonnet 5.5A Claude Sonnet release for everyday agentic, coding, and knowledge work.
- DeepSeek V4.1 FlashDeepSeek's smallest model in its V4.1 architecture family, with native visual understanding, served on the DeepSeek API as deepseek-flash. Since October 17, 2026 that name serves the DeepSeek-V4.1-Flash-1017 build. Weights under the MIT license.
- DeepSeek V4 ProDeepSeek's largest V4 model, a mixture-of-experts model with 1.6T parameters and 49B active and a 1M-token context, served on the DeepSeek API as deepseek-v4-pro with text input only. The 0813 build is its generally available release, superseding the April preview. Weights under the MIT license.
- Gemini 3.1 Pro PreviewA preview Gemini Pro release for advanced reasoning and multimodal work.
- Gemini 3.8 FlashA Gemini Flash release for long-horizon software engineering, agents, and enterprise workflows.
- Gemini 4 ArgonGoogle's Gemini 4 Argon release for advanced reasoning and multimodal work. Google announced it on September 30, 2026 as a limited rollout to cyber defenders in its Fairwind Program; it has been generally available on the Gemini API and Agent Platform since October 13, 2026.
- Gemma 4 31BGoogle's largest dense Gemma 4 open model, with optional reasoning and a 256K-token context window. Weights under the Apache 2.0 license; the Gemini API serves it on its free tier only, with no paid rate.
- GLM-5.3Z.ai's flagship open-weight model for coding and agentic work, with a 1M-token context window, on the Z.ai API and also served by Mistral AI and OpenRouter. Weights under the GLM-5.3 License.
- GLM-5.3-FlashZ.ai's first native multimodal model in the GLM-5 series, for efficient coding and long-horizon agent tasks, with a 1M-token context and a faster FlashX variant. 320B parameters with 18B active; weights under the MIT license.
- GPT-6.1 SolOpenAI's newer Sol model, close to GPT-6 Astra on complex work at a lower cost. On OpenAI's own OSWorld 2.1 computer-use run (offline set) it scores 78%, 2.9 points under GPT-6 Astra at about a seventh of the cost per task. API model gpt-6.1-sol, with a 1,050,000-token context on the OpenAI API; Microsoft Foundry caps input at 922,000 tokens.
- GPT-6.1 TerraOpenAI's fast, efficient GPT-6.1 model for visual reasoning, computer use and writing, at US$1 per million input tokens and US$5 per million output tokens. Artificial Analysis scores it 51 on its Intelligence Index at US$0.96 per task, and OpenAI's own OSWorld 2.1 computer-use run (offline set) puts it at 74.2%, 3.8 points under GPT-6.1 Sol. API model gpt-6.1-terra, with a 1,050,000-token context and 128,000 output tokens on the OpenAI API.
- GPT-6 AstraOpenAI's highest-capability GPT-6 release for complex end-to-end work.
- GPT-6 LunaOpenAI's most efficient GPT-6 model, for focused, high-volume tasks. API model gpt-6-luna, with a 1,050,000-token context on the OpenAI API; Microsoft Foundry caps input at 922,000 tokens.
- gpt-oss-120bOpenAI's largest open-weight model, 117B parameters with 5.1B active, with a 131,072-token context window. Weights under the Apache 2.0 license; OpenAI lists no API price for it, so it runs on your own hardware or a host's.
- Grok 4.7xAI's Grok release for agentic coding and multistep work. API model grok-4.7, with a 500K-token context window on the xAI API, Microsoft Foundry, and OpenRouter, and 524,288 tokens on Amazon Bedrock and Google Cloud.
- Kimi K3.1 ProMoonshot AI's first K3.1 release, a post-trained Kimi K3 with a 1M-token context window and a Highspeed variant on the Kimi API. Weights under the Kimi K3.1 Pro License.
- Mercury 3Inception's diffusion language model, which writes many tokens in parallel and refines them, with a 1M-token context window.
- MiniMax M3.1 FlashMiniMax's multimodal reasoning model for agentic work, with a 1M-token context window, on the MiniMax API, M Plan and MiniMax Code, and also on OpenRouter and OpenCode Go.
- Mistral Large 4Mistral AI's flagship multimodal mixture-of-experts model, in Public Preview (v26.10) on the Mistral API and Mistral Studio since October 6, 2026, and also on OpenRouter and OpenCode Zen. Mistral has published no GA date. Its open weights followed on October 29, 2026, under the Mistral Ecosystem Open-Weight license, a modified MIT license.
