cloudparts

OpenRouter

A hosted gateway that sells access to 400+ models from more than 80 providers through one OpenAI-compatible API and one prepaid credit balance, choosing a provider for each request by price, recent uptime and your routing rules.

What it is
Model routers and gateways
Type
Commercial product
Made by
OpenRouter, Inc.
License
Proprietary
Facts checked
13 October 2026
Website

What it is

You buy credits, create an API key and send OpenAI-style requests to https://openrouter.ai/api/v1/chat/completions; an Anthropic-style /api/v1/messages endpoint is there too, which is how Claude Code connects. A model slug maps to one or more provider endpoints. By default OpenRouter skips providers with significant outages in the last 30 seconds, picks among the cheapest of the rest with odds weighted by the inverse square of their price, and keeps the others as fallbacks. A provider object in the request overrides that: a fixed order, allow or ignore lists, sorting by price, throughput or latency, zero-data-retention endpoints only, quantization filters or a maximum price. A models array falls back to other models on errors, rate limits, context-length failures or moderation refusals, and you pay for the model that answered.

Token prices are the providers’ own, per million tokens, with no markup. OpenRouter charges 5.5% ($0.80 minimum) when you buy credits by card and 5% for crypto. Using your own provider keys is free up to $25,000 of list-price usage a month on pay-as-you-go, then costs 5% of what the same calls would cost through OpenRouter. :free model variants allow 50 requests a day, or 1,000 a day once you have bought at least 10 credits. OpenRouter stores metadata for every request (token counts, latency) but not prompts or completions unless you opt in to logging, or to letting it use them in exchange for a 1% discount; each provider has its own retention policy, which routing can filter on. Business and Enterprise plans can send traffic to eu.openrouter.ai or us.openrouter.ai to keep processing in one region.

On 19 August 2026 Stripe announced that it had agreed to acquire OpenRouter. OpenRouter said it would keep the same name, product and roadmap, that existing integrations would not change, and that it expected the deal to close within weeks. It reported more than 10 trillion tokens a day from 400+ models for over 10 million developers and companies.

Why teams pick it

  • One key, one bill and one API for hundreds of models, with OpenAI- and Anthropic-style endpoints that existing SDKs and tools such as Claude Code can point at
  • Automatic failover across providers of the same model and, with models, across different models
  • No markup on provider token prices; the cost of the gateway is the fee on buying credits
  • Routing control per request: provider order, allow and ignore lists, zero-data-retention only, quantization filters and price caps

Watch out for

  • Another party in the data path: prompts pass through OpenRouter and then a provider whose own retention policy you have to check, and request metadata is always stored
  • The default favors cheaper providers, which may differ in quantization or supported parameters; pin behavior with require_parameters, quantization filters or a fixed provider order
  • Fees add up at volume: 5.5% on card top-ups, and 5% on bring-your-own-key traffic above $25,000 a month
  • Free variants are capped at 50 requests a day (1,000 after buying 10 credits) and may be less available than paid ones

How it fits with other technologies

Fall back across models, prefer fast providers, cap the price and skip providers that store data · bash

curl https://openrouter.ai/api/v1/chat/completions \
  -H "Authorization: Bearer $OPENROUTER_API_KEY" \
  -H "Content-Type: application/json" \
  -d '{
    "models": ["~anthropic/claude-sonnet-latest", "deepseek/deepseek-v3.2"],
    "messages": [{ "role": "user", "content": "Hello" }],
    "provider": {
      "sort": "throughput",
      "data_collection": "deny",
      "max_price": { "prompt": 1, "completion": 2 }
    }
  }'

See it in a real stack

No architecture uses OpenRouter yet. Drop it into the playground and wire it up yourself.Open playground →
Where it came from2023–2026

Alex Atallah and Louis Vichy started OpenRouter in early 2023 on the belief that “intelligence will be multi-model”: no single model would win every task and the frontier would move fast, so developers would want one neutral interface to all of them. It passed provider prices through unchanged, earned a fee on credits, and published rankings and leaderboards built from its traffic.

In June 2025 it raised $40 million in seed and Series A rounds led by Andreessen Horowitz and Menlo Ventures. Atallah said companies were ripping out home-grown gateways they had built for using four or more models. The product grew to cover batch requests, in-region routing, guardrails and budgets.

OpenRouter had long been called “Stripe for LLMs,” and on 19 August 2026 Stripe agreed to buy it. Stripe said OpenRouter routed across 400+ models from more than 80 providers for customers such as NVIDIA, Zoom and Lovable; OpenRouter, then a 90-person company, promised that routing would keep favoring no model, provider or parent company.

Why it’s built this way

Pass through provider prices and charge on credits
Developers pay the same per-token rate as going direct, so using the gateway costs only the credit fee.
Pool providers per model, weighted by price
Several providers behind one model raise uptime: requests avoid recently failing providers and fall back automatically, while cheaper ones get most of the traffic.
Neutral routing
The founders expect no single model to win every task, so routing decisions are meant to serve the user rather than any model, provider or owner, a commitment repeated when joining Stripe.
Prompt retention only by opt-in
OpenRouter says it has never shared, sold or licensed prompt data; logging and product use of prompts are off by default.

Timeline

  1. 2023

    Founded by Alex Atallah and Louis Vichy (early 2023)

  2. 2025

    Raises $40 million led by Andreessen Horowitz and Menlo Ventures (June)

  3. 2026

    Stripe agrees to acquire OpenRouter (19 August)

  4. 2026

    US and EU in-region routing, and a Batch API at half price (September)

Sources10 · facts checked 13 October 2026

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