Frequently Asked Questions

OpenRouter provides a unified API to access all the major LLM models on the market. It also allows users to aggregate their billing in one place and keep track of all of their usage using our analytics.

OpenRouter passes through the pricing of the underlying providers, while pooling their uptime, so you get the same pricing you’d get from the provider directly, with a unified API and fallbacks so that you get much better uptime.

To get started, create an account and add credits on the Credits page. Credits are simply deposits on OpenRouter that you use for LLM inference. When you use the API or chat interface, we deduct the request cost from your credits. Each model and provider has a different price per million tokens.

Once you have credits you can either use the chat room, or create API keys and start using the API. You can read our quickstart guide for code samples and more.

The best way to get support is to join our Discord and ping us in the #help forum.

For each model we have the pricing displayed per million tokens. There is usually a different price for prompt and completion tokens. There are also models that charge per request, for images and for reasoning tokens. All of these details will be visible on the models page.

When you make a request to OpenRouter, we receive the total number of tokens processed by the provider. We then calculate the corresponding cost and deduct it from your credits. You can review your complete usage history in the Activity tab.

We pass through the pricing of the underlying providers; there is no markup on inference pricing (however we do charge a fee when purchasing credits).

OpenRouter provides access to a wide variety of LLM models, including frontier models from major AI labs. For a complete list of models you can visit the models browser or fetch the list through the models api.

We work on adding models as quickly as we can. We often have partnerships with the labs releasing models and can release models as soon as they are available. If there is a model missing that you’d like OpenRouter to support, feel free to message us on Discord.

Variants are suffixes that can be added to the model slug to change its behavior.

Static variants can only be used with specific models and these are listed in our models api.

1. :free - The model is always provided for free and has low rate limits.
2. :beta - The model is not moderated by OpenRouter.
3. :extended - The model has longer than usual context length.
4. :thinking - The model supports reasoning by default.

Dynamic variants can be used on all models and they change the behavior of how the request is routed or used.

1. :online - All requests will run a query to extract web results that are attached to the prompt.
2. :nitro - Providers will be sorted by throughput rather than the default sort, optimizing for faster response times.
3. :floor - Providers will be sorted by price rather than the default sort, prioritizing the most cost-effective options.

You can read our requirements at the Providers page. If you would like to contact us, the best place to reach us is over email.

For each model on OpenRouter we show the latency (time to first token) and the token throughput for all providers. You can use this to estimate how long requests will take. If you would like to optimize for throughput you can use the :nitro variant to route to the fastest provider.

If a provider returns an error OpenRouter will automatically fall back to the next provider. This happens transparently to the user and allows production apps to be much more resilient. OpenRouter has a lot of options to configure the provider routing behavior. The full documentation can be found here.

OpenRouter uses three authentication methods:

1. Cookie-based authentication for the web interface and chatroom
2. API keys (passed as Bearer tokens) for accessing the completions API and other core endpoints
3. Provisioned API keys for programmatically managing API keys through the key management endpoints

Free models have a hard limit of 200 requests per day. For all other models, rate limits are determined by the credits in your account. You can read more details in our rate limits documentation.

OpenRouter implements the OpenAI API specification for /completions and /chat/completions endpoints, allowing you to use any model with the same request/response format. Additional endpoints like /api/v1/models are also available. See our API documentation for detailed specifications.

The API supports text and images. Images can be passed as URLs or base64 encoded images. PDF and other file types are coming soon.

Streaming uses server-sent events (SSE) for real-time token delivery. Set stream: true in your request to enable streaming responses.

OpenRouter is a drop-in replacement for OpenAI. Therefore, any SDKs that support OpenAI by default also support OpenRouter. Check out our docs for more details.

We log basic request metadata (timestamps, model used, token counts). Prompt and completion are not logged by default. We do zero logging of your prompts/completions, even if an error occurs, unless you opt-in to logging them.

We have an opt-in setting that lets users opt-in to log their prompts and completions in exchange for a 1% discount on usage costs.

OpenRouter is a proxy that sends your requests to the model provider for it to be completed. We work with all providers to, when possible, ensure that prompts and completions are not logged or used for training. Providers that do log, or where we have been unable to confirm their policy, will not be routed to unless the model training toggle is switched on in the privacy settings tab.

If you specify provider routing in your request, but none of the providers match the level of privacy specified in your account settings, you will get an error and your request will not complete.

OpenRouter uses a credit system where the base currency is US dollars. All of the pricing on our site and API is denoted in dollars. Users can top up their balance manually or set up auto top up so that the balance is replenished when it gets below the set threshold.

Per our terms, we reserve the right to expire unused credits after one year of purchase.

If you paid using Stripe, sometimes there is an issue with the Stripe integration and credits can get delayed in showing up on your account. Please allow up to one hour. If your credits still have not appeared after an hour, contact us on Discord and we will look into it.

If you paid using crypto, please reach out to us on Discord and we will look into it.

OpenRouter currently does not offer refunds for purchased credits.

The Activity page allows users to view their historic usage and filter the usage by model, provider and api key.

We also provide a credits api that has live information about the balance and remaining credits for the account.

All new users receive a very small free allowance to be able to test out OpenRouter. There are many free models available on OpenRouter, it is important to note that these models have low rate limits (200 requests per day) and are usually not suitable for production use.

OpenRouter does not currently offer volume discounts, but you can reach out to us over email if you think you have an exceptional use case.

We accept all major credit cards, AliPay and cryptocurrency payments in USDC. We are working on integrating PayPal soon, if there are any payment methods that you would like us to support please reach out on Discord.

We charge a small fee when purchasing credits. We never mark-up the pricing of the underlying providers, and you’ll always pay the same as the provider’s listed price.

Go to the Settings page and click Manage Account. In the modal that opens, select the Security tab. You’ll find an option there to delete your account.

Note that unused credits will be lost and cannot be reclaimed if you delete and later recreate your account.

Team management is coming very soon! For now you can use provisioning API keys to allow sharing credits with people on your team.

Our activity dashboard provides real-time usage metrics. If you would like any specific reports or metrics please contact us.

The best way to reach us is to join our Discord and ping us in the #help forum.