OpenRouter

OpenRouter is a unified API gateway that routes requests to hundreds of LLMs across many providers through one OpenAI-compatible endpoint. It adds automatic fallbacks, price and latency routing, transparency into model usage, and consolidated billing, monetizing via a small markup on inference spend. It is popular with developers building multi-model and agent applications.

OpenRouter is an aggregation layer for large language models. Instead of integrating with each provider separately, developers call a single OpenAI-compatible endpoint and choose from hundreds of models across OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, Meta, DeepSeek, Mistral, and many open-model hosts. OpenRouter handles routing, automatic fallbacks when a provider is down, and price or latency-based selection, and it consolidates usage into one bill. The value proposition is flexibility and resilience: you can compare models, switch between them with a string change, avoid vendor lock-in, and keep working if one upstream provider has an outage. OpenRouter also surfaces useful transparency, including live rankings of model usage and per-model pricing, and it offers a number of free models with rate limits. OpenRouter monetizes with a small markup on inference spend (reported around 5%) plus payment processing, so you pay roughly upstream prices plus a fee for the convenience. It is popular with developers building agents and multi-model apps who value being able to route across providers without rewriting integrations.