OpenRouter vs Direct API: Compare Total Costs

What does the same monthly workload cost?

These stored examples use 2,000 input tokens and 500 output tokens per request, 10,000 requests per month, no cached reads and no credit fee. Each row compares one exact model across channels. Different rows are examples of price options, not evidence of equivalent output quality. The model links provide individual context and pricing notes.

When does the credit fee change the cheaper route?

OpenRouter describes its inference pricing as pass-through pricing, with a separate fee when buying credits. A listed route can still differ from our stored first-party record because the endpoint, verification date or pricing conditions differ. Inspect both sources before assuming that a displayed difference represents a provider discount. The optional fee control applies the stored percentage to estimated OpenRouter usage only.

For example, at a hypothetical 5.5% funding fee, a route costing $90 before the fee becomes $94.95. A $98 route becomes $103.39, so it would exceed a $100 direct estimate. These are arithmetic examples, not current offers. Small credit purchases can have a higher effective percentage because of a minimum purchase fee. This tool does not know your deposit amount or existing balance, so it does not apply that minimum to every API call.

OpenRouter pricing and funding terms · OpenRouter FAQ

When should you choose a direct API or a router?

A direct provider account can fit a workload that depends on one provider’s specific features, billing agreement or support process. A router can fit an application that needs several providers behind a unified API and billing workflow. Those operational benefits are separate from the token bill. We do not invent an engineering-hours saving or a latency advantage to make either option win.

Bring-your-own-key billing is a separate arrangement and is not modeled by the credit-fee switch. Check your account’s current BYOK terms, endpoint availability, data handling and feature support directly. If both costs are close, a small representative test can tell you more about operational fit than a nominal price difference.

How should you interpret this estimate?

The same token counts isolate price differences. In production, tokenization, output length, retries and tool use can differ between models. Test your own examples before selecting a cheaper option. A model with a lower token rate can cost more per successful task if it requires repeated attempts or more generated output. Our examples do not measure quality, latency or reliability.

A page build is not a new price verification. The dates beside source links show when each stored price was verified. Failed checks preserve older values rather than replacing them with guesses; an old snapshot can still be useful for testing the calculator, but needs confirmation at the provider before a purchasing decision. Read the methodology for how the two channels are recorded separately.

Pricing methodology · Recorded price changes