OpenRouter

What is OpenRouter?

OpenRouter is a unified API gateway that sits in front of hundreds of language models from dozens of providers, OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, Meta, Mistral, and a long tail of open-weight models. Instead of juggling separate API keys, billing accounts, and SDKs for every model you want to try, you point your app at one endpoint and switch models by changing a string. It's built for developers who want to compare models quickly, hedge against a single provider's downtime, or route requests to whichever model is cheapest or fastest for a given task.

Key features

• Single OpenAI-compatible API surface for models from many different providers
• Automatic fallback routing so a request can retry on a different provider or model if one fails or rate-limits you
• Pay-as-you-go billing across every model through one account, no separate contracts
• Model and provider rankings based on real usage, useful for picking a model you haven't tried
• Prompt and response logging tools for debugging multi-model setups

Who it's for

Solid for builders who want to experiment across models without setting up a separate integration for each one, or who need a fallback path when their primary provider has an outage. Less useful if you're committed to a single provider's SDK-specific features (like native function calling quirks or provider-specific fine-tuning) that don't map cleanly through a unified interface.

Pricing

Usage-based, pay per token with a small markup over the underlying provider's own pricing, plus free access to some models with rate limits. Check the tool's site for current per-model rates.