OpenRouter
One API key and one credit balance for 450+ language models
Overview
OpenRouter is a gateway that puts more than 450 language models from 80+ providers behind one OpenAI-compatible API, with automatic fallback, price and latency routing, and one prepaid credit balance. Inference is billed at provider list prices plus a fee on credit purchases. Stripe announced an agreement to acquire OpenRouter on 19 August 2026; we found no announcement that the deal has closed.
Pricing
Pricing shown for reference only. These figures reflect RECATOOLS research as of 14 Oct 2026 and may be out of date or incomplete. This is not financial or purchasing advice — always confirm the current price on the provider’s official website before making any decision.
- 50 requests a day on free models
- Chat and API access, activity logs and export
- Community support
- 500+ models from 80+ providers
- Auto-routing, budgets and spend controls, prompt caching
- BYOK free to $25,000 of list-price inference a month, 5% after
- Email support
- Everything in Standard
- EU and US in-region routing, advanced notifications
- Workload Identity Federation and up to 1,000 workspaces
- Signed DPA on request
- SSO/SAML and SCIM
- Contractual SLAs and managed policy enforcement
- Dedicated support team
What you can produce with OpenRouter
- One OpenAI-compatible API reaching 450+ models from 80+ providers
- Automatic provider fallback, with routing by price, latency or data policy
- One prepaid credit balance across every provider, paid by card, AliPay or USDC
- Bring-your-own-key routing, free up to $25,000 of list-price inference a month
- Budgets, spend controls and per-key activity logs
- Free, rate-limited models for prototyping
- Zero-data-retention routing, plus EU or US in-region routing on Business
OpenRouter removes the chore of holding a dozen provider keys and invoices: one OpenAI-compatible endpoint reaches more than 450 models, fails over when a provider stalls, and makes it quick to compare two models or swap one for another without touching code. Costs are transparent. You pay provider list prices plus 5.5% on credit purchases, and bring-your-own-key traffic is free up to $25,000 of list-price inference a month. Free models are useful for prototyping but capped at 50 requests a day until you buy $10 of credits, and Trustpilot reviewers complain about support and expired credits.
Weigh the Stripe deal too. Routing neutrality is the product, and it would sit inside a payments company. We route our own model calls through OpenRouter, so this is a stake rather than a view from outside. Good for optionality and resilience; a team committed to one model at scale may do as well going direct.
What we found
OpenRouter is a gateway that puts hundreds of language models behind one OpenAI-compatible API, one account and one credit balance. Alex Atallah and Louis Vichy started it in early 2023, it is run by OpenRouter, Inc. from New York, and its public models endpoint listed 462 models on 14 October 2026; the pricing page rounds that to 500+ from more than 80 providers. Routing can pick a provider by price or latency, fall back automatically when one fails, and send traffic only to providers that meet a data policy.
Ownership is changing. On 19 August 2026 Stripe announced an agreement to acquire OpenRouter. Neither company disclosed a price; The New York Times put it at about $7.5 billion, and we found no announcement that the deal has closed. OpenRouter says it will keep its name, product and routing neutrality. Before that it raised $40 million in seed and Series A money in 2025, led by Andreessen Horowitz and Menlo Ventures, and a $113 million Series B led by Alphabet's CapitalG in May 2026.
Inference is billed at providers' list prices. OpenRouter's margin is a fee on credit purchases: 5.5% on the self-serve plan and 8% on Business. Bring-your-own-key use is free up to $25,000 of list-price inference a month, then costs 5%. Earlier versions of this page described a one-million-request BYOK allowance and an $0.80 minimum fee; neither appears on OpenRouter's pages now. Unused credits can be expired after a year, and refunds are possible only within 24 hours of purchase.
Free models are a sandbox, capped at 20 requests a minute and 50 a day, rising to 1,000 a day once an account has bought $10 of credits. On Trustpilot, OpenRouter's unclaimed profile scored 1.6 from 66 reviews (read 14 October 2026), with complaints about support and expired credits. For teams that want to switch models without rewriting code, it remains a practical and well-documented route.
Compiled by RECATOOLS from public sources: vendor documentation and pricing, code repositories and published reporting.
About this listing
This entry was compiled from publicly available data including OpenRouter's official website, press releases, documentation, and reputable third-party publications. RECATOOLS is not affiliated with OpenRouter unless explicitly stated.
Third-party AI tools update their pricing, features, availability, and policies frequently. Information here may be outdated by the time you read this — we make reasonable efforts to keep listings current, but cannot guarantee absolute accuracy.
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