OpenRouter
Accessing multiple cloud AI models (Claude, GPT, Gemini) through a single API, Comparing pricing and performance of different AI models, Using it as a cost-effective API for open-weight models
It's a unified gateway to compare and use many AI models, but you must actively monitor costs as usage can be expensive.
Comparing LLM inference performance metrics (data can appear fishy), Keeping costs predictable for casual experimentation (credits can burn quickly)
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FIRST-HAND READS
What people reported, in their own words. Every line links to where it was said.
“the API costs are so cheap even when setting openrouter to ZDR and preferring throughput over cost”
POSITIVE · price · Reddit · 2026-08-15
“OpenRouter slashes pricing on it, like right now it's serving at 1.54/million output (vs $3-4)”
POSITIVE · price · Reddit · 2026-08-15
“I'm able to do everything with OpenRouter and cheap Chinese models”
POSITIVE · price · Hacker News · 2026-07-28
“use openrouter in a custom build to make decisions. Bookkeeping is 5 minutes a month, now.”
POSITIVE · performance · Reddit · 2026-07-15
“I was using it on OpenRouter and it was all janky in the traces, stuttering and going in circles”
NEGATIVE · performance · Hacker News · 2026-07-09
“Nearly every model can be found on OpenRouter and used with a single key”
POSITIVE · features · Hacker News · 2026-07-09
“implemented the same feature by my own on Pi with models through OpenRouter and found results very stable”
POSITIVE · performance · Hacker News · 2026-07-09
“Openrouter has very good telemetry (which is partly why I went with them)”
POSITIVE · Hacker News · 2026-07-07
“using GLM 5.2 with openrouter + opencode and am spending less than $5/day for equivalent output”
POSITIVE · price · Hacker News · 2026-07-06
“I paid $6 yesterday for DeepSeek V4 Flash on OpenRouter. That's like $120 dollar for a month”
NEGATIVE · price · Hacker News · 2026-07-02
“I'l go the OpenRouter route for a while to explore various models”
POSITIVE · features · Hacker News · 2026-06-30
“It's absurdly cheap to use the same model via openrouter in comparison”
POSITIVE · price · Hacker News · 2026-06-29
“Paying by the token for it on openrouter etc is more expensive than just having a Codex or Claude coding plan”
NEGATIVE · price · Hacker News · 2026-06-28
“openrouter lets me use Kiki and glm and deepseek for cheap if I need long tasks”
POSITIVE · features · Hacker News · 2026-06-28
“There seems to be only one provider left on openrouter (NovitaAI) and 3/4 requests error out”
NEGATIVE · reliability · Hacker News · 2026-06-27
“My own harness + OpenRouter with whichever model I want to try out. I use this very rarely.”
LUKEWARM · Hacker News · 2026-06-25
“Openrouter breaks Deepseek caching and charges me multiple times over what I pay for Deepseek's API”
NEGATIVE · price · Hacker News · 2026-06-25
“works great with your codex subscription or openrouter or fireworks etc.”
POSITIVE · integration · Hacker News · 2026-06-23
“My 10 bucks at OpenRouter has lasted me several months for these edge cases.”
POSITIVE · price · Hacker News · 2026-06-23
“i can easily spend 10$ a day on openrouter (200-300$/month). Using top-tier models on openrouter is so much more expensive from my experience then any subscription.”
NEGATIVE · price · Hacker News · 2026-06-23
“This was all done using home-brew setup running on openrouter”
MIXED · features · Hacker News · 2026-06-22
“I love openrouter for this, I just put in $20 and i'm able to chat with almost every model out right now or plug their api into any ide that supports openai api requests”
POSITIVE · features · Hacker News · 2026-06-21
“$2 seems a lot cheaper than my own experience accessing them through OpenRouter for over 100 million tokens”
LUKEWARM · price · Hacker News · 2026-06-18
“Mathematica client supports openrouter as LLM provider anyway so we can use whatever we want.”
POSITIVE · features · Hacker News · 2026-06-17
“one scary issue I had with OpenRouter in the early days, I think I saw somebody else's context and there were weird Chinese characters, haven't touched it since.”
NEGATIVE · reliability · Hacker News · 2026-05-30
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