Trial
OpenRouter is one of the most used model aggregator: one OpenAI-compatible API and one API key for hundreds of models across all major providers, with pay-per-use pricing, automatic fallbacks and provider routing. Useful for model evaluation, fast switching between frontier models and avoiding per-provider onboarding; its public usage rankings double as a practical adoption signal.
- BYOK (bring your own provider keys) is supported: 1M requests/month free, then a 5% fee on the equivalent platform cost.
- Data residency needs attention: standard usage may process data in the US; EU in-region routing (
eu.openrouter.ai, hard-locked EU processing) is an enterprise-only feature since June 2026 and covers a subset of models. - It is a SaaS marketplace, not gateway software - for self-hosted governance (budgets, keys, audit) see LiteLLM.