AI Models
OpenRouter
Unified API for hundreds of models. One API key, one billing dashboard. OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, Meta, Mistral, and more. Automatic fallbacks and load balancing.
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OpenRouter gives you a single API endpoint to access every major AI model - OpenAI (GPT), Anthropic (Claude), Google (Gemini), Meta (Llama), Mistral, and hundreds more. One API key, unified billing, automatic fallbacks if a provider is down. It's essential for comparing models without managing multiple API keys and billing accounts. I use it when I need to quickly swap between models for testing or when building apps that should work across providers.
OpenRouter at a glance
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- Pricing
- Free - $0: 25+ free models from 4 free providers, 50 requests/day
- Standard - pay as you go, 5.5% fee on credit purchases: 500+ models, 80+ providers, auto-routing, budgets, prompt caching
- Business - pay as you go, 8% fee on credit purchases: adds EU and US in-region routing, 1,000 workspaces, Workload Identity Federation
- Enterprise - contract pricing with fee discounts, SSO/SAML, SLAs and invoicing; contact sales
- Inference is billed at the provider's list price on every plan; BYOK includes $25,000/mo of list-price inference with no fee, then 5%
- Install
npm install @openrouter/sdkpip install openrouternpm install @openrouter/agent- Models
- 500+ models from 80+ providers behind one OpenAI-compatible API. You pick a model by slug (for example the ~openai/gpt-sol-latest alias, which tracks the newest model in a family), or send openrouter/auto to let the Auto Router choose, with automatic fallback to other providers when one fails.
- Recent changes
- Private Endpoints let Enterprise customers route their own fine-tuned models and dedicated deployments through OpenRouter, visible only inside their organization.
- ElevenLabs joins with 9 text-to-speech and 2 speech-to-text models, including Eleven v4, v4 Turbo and Scribe v2.
- OpenRouter announces it is joining Stripe; it says the product, name and roadmap stay the same and existing integrations do not change.
Sources: OpenRouter pricing, OpenRouter quickstart, OpenRouter blog, OpenRouter is joining Stripe
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Get started with OpenRouter
Unified API for hundreds of models. One API key, one billing dashboard. OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, Meta, Mistral, and more. Automatic fallbacks and load balancing.
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Claude
Anthropic's model family. As of October 2026: Opus 5.5 as the default, Fable 5.1 for the hardest long-horizon work, Sonnet 5.5 for speed, Haiku 5.5 for cost. 1M context. Max from $100/mo.
ChatGPT
OpenAI's chat app. As of October 2026 Free and Go run GPT-6 Luna; Plus ($20/mo) adds GPT-6.1 Sol and GPT-6 Astra. Agent mode, Codex, image generation, code interpreter.
DeepSeek
Chinese lab shipping open-weight MoE models. The V4 family (previewed April 24, 2026) runs a 1M context on DeepSeek's API; R1 (2025) popularized open reasoning models. Low-cost API.
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