OpenRouter
Verified May 27, 2026OpenRouter is an aggregator that exposes hundreds of models from dozens of upstream providers through a single OpenAI-compatible API. Instead of running its own inference, it routes each request to the cheapest or fastest backend matching the model and your latency preferences, and adds a small markup on the upstream token price.
The strength is breadth — closed-source frontier models from Anthropic and Google sit next to open-weights endpoints from Together, Fireworks, DeepInfra, and Groq — all under one key and one billing relationship. The trade-off is that provider-specific features like fine-tuning, dedicated endpoints, and structured output sometimes get smoothed over.
Inference stays in whichever upstream region you pin; OpenRouter does not warehouse model weights itself.
Calculate cost for your workload
Plug in your monthly tokens — get the actual bill on every provider serving each model.
Open calculator