How does OpenRouter compare with the alternatives?
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.
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.
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.
By GILD's calculation, at 1,000,000 gpt-oss-120b requests a month of 2,000 input and 500 output tokens, OpenRouter pinned to Together's endpoint adds a US$33 credit fee to Together's US$600. Pick OpenRouter to route the same model across hosts. Pick Together AI to hold one host and buy dedicated GPUs.
