OpenRouter Pricing: Fees, Free Tier & Features (2026)

Founded 2023|11-50 people|Free plan, then provider rates plus a platform fee on credit purchases (5.5% Standard, 8% Business), Enterprise custom

What is OpenRouter?

OpenRouter is an LLM gateway that gives you one OpenAI-compatible API and one key for 500+ models from 80+ providers, including OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, Meta, and Mistral. Stripe announced an agreement to acquire OpenRouter in August 2026.

Model calls bill at each provider's rate, and OpenRouter charges a platform fee on credit purchases: 5.5% on Standard and 8% on Business, with a $0.80 minimum on card purchases. Bringing your own provider keys is fee-free up to $25,000 of list-price inference a month, then carries a 5% fee. The free plan covers 25+ free models at 50 requests a day, which rises to 1,000 a day once you've bought $10 in credits.

Its features center on routing and spend, with auto-routing, budgets, prompt caching, and per-key activity logs. OpenRouter doesn't score or evaluate outputs itself, and its Broadcast feature forwards request traces to external tools like Langfuse, Datadog, and PostHog, which is where many teams start weighing OpenRouter alternatives that keep routing and evals in one place.

Key features

Core capabilities this platform advertises.

One OpenAI-compatible API for 500+ models from 80+ providers
Auto-routing across providers
Budgets and management API keys
Prompt caching
Bring your own keys, fee-free up to $25,000 a month

Strengths and tradeoffs

What this tool does well, and the limitations to keep in mind.

Pros

One key and one bill across 80+ providers
Model calls billed at provider rates
Free plan for prototyping on free models
BYOK fee-free up to $25,000 of list-price inference a month
Broadcast sends request traces to tools like Langfuse and Datadog

Cons

Platform fee of 5.5% on Standard and 8% on Business, with a $0.80 minimum on card purchases
Doesn't score or evaluate outputs, so quality checks happen in another tool
Credits may be expired one year after purchase
Free plan capped at 50 requests a day until you've bought $10 in credits

Plans & pricing

What's included in each plan, and how the tiers compare.

Free Models

Forever

25+ free models, 50 requests/day (1,000 with $10+ in credits), activity logs

Standard

Provider rates + 5.5%

500+ models from 80+ providers, auto-routing, budgets, prompt caching, BYOK fee-free to $25,000/month then 5%

Business

Provider rates + 8%

Everything in Standard, plus EU/US in-region routing, advanced notifications, up to 1,000 workspaces

Enterprise

Custom

Contact sales for a quote

SSO/SAML, managed policy enforcement, contractual SLAs, dedicated support, fee discounts

View official pricing page

Common use cases

Developers and teams who want one API for hundreds of LLMs without provider lock-in

Building model-agnostic apps that switch providers freely
Accessing many providers with one key and one bill
Comparing models side by side from a single API
Tracking spend per API key
Prototyping on free models

Using OpenRouter with Respan

Respan's gateway calls OpenRouter models directly with an openrouter/ model prefix and a Respan API key, and Respan handles provider auth and billing. Every call is logged with cost and latency next to calls to other providers, and you can attach your own OpenRouter key or log OpenRouter calls without proxying them.

Call OpenRouter models through the Respan gateway with one Respan key
Unified logs, cost, and latency across OpenRouter and direct providers
Bring your own OpenRouter key, or log calls without proxying
Evals on live production traffic, linked to each trace
No processing fee on Respan credits
Hard spend limits per key, per customer, or org-wide

One API for 1,000+ models, with evals built in

10KFree traces/mo

1,000+Models

5 minSetup

Respan routes every call across 1,000+ models, traces each request, and scores output on live production traffic. Respan credits carry no processing fee. Start free.

Try Respan free

Best OpenRouter alternatives & competitors

Top companies in LLM Gateways you can use instead of OpenRouter.

Respan

One API for 1,000+ models