TL;DR (October 20, 2026): OpenRouter does not mark up tokens. Every model is billed at the provider's list price, and OpenRouter takes its cut when you buy credits: 5.5% by card with a $0.80 minimum on the Standard pay-as-you-go plan, 5% for crypto, and 8% on the Business plan. BYOK (your own provider keys) is fee-free up to $25,000 of list-price inference a month, then 5%. Free models are capped at 20 requests a minute and 50 a day, or 1,000 a day once you have bought at least $10 of credits. Taxes are extra, platform fees are not refundable, and unused credits can be refunded only within 24 hours.
"Is OpenRouter more expensive than going direct?" has a precise answer, and it is not the one most people expect. The token price is the same. The fee sits on the money you put in, so what you actually pay depends on how you top up, which plan you are on, and whether you bring your own keys. This page sets out OpenRouter's pricing as of October 2026 and works out when the gateway costs more than the provider and when it does not.
OpenRouter plans and fees
| Free | Standard (pay as you go) | Business | Enterprise | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Platform fee | N/A | 5.5% on credit purchases | 8% on credit purchases | Discounts available |
| Models | 25+ free models, 4 free providers | 500+ models, 80+ providers | 500+ models, 80+ providers | 500+ models, 80+ providers |
| Rate limits | 50 requests a day | Passed through from providers | Passed through from providers | Higher allowances |
| BYOK | No | $25,000 list-price inference a month free, then 5% | Same as Standard | Custom |
| Prompt caching | No | Yes | Yes | Yes |
| Budgets and spend controls | No | Yes | Yes | Yes |
| EU or US in-region routing | No | No | Yes | Yes |
| Workspaces | 5 | 5 | 1,000 | Custom |
| Payment | None | Card, AliPay, crypto (USDC) | Card, AliPay, crypto (USDC) | Invoicing and purchase orders |
From OpenRouter's pricing page and FAQ, read October 20, 2026. Prices exclude VAT and GST.
OpenRouter's FAQ is specific about the card fee: 5.5% with a $0.80 minimum, and 5% for crypto payments. Business needs no contract or minimum spend; you upgrade in settings and can downgrade 30 days later. Neither paid plan has a minimum spend or lock-in.
The fee is on credits, not tokens
OpenRouter's pricing page answers the markup question directly: "Inference is billed at the provider's list price on every plan. OpenRouter's fee is charged when you buy credits, 5.5% on Standard and 8% on Business, never on individual requests." We checked a few rows of OpenRouter's model catalog against the providers' own price pages on October 20: Grok 4.7 lists at $2 input and $6 output per million tokens, the same as xAI, and Claude Opus 5.5 at $4 and $20, the same as Anthropic.
So the real cost of a model on OpenRouter is its list price times the fee on the money you used to buy credits. The $0.80 minimum makes small top-ups disproportionately expensive:
| Card top-up (Standard) | Fee | Effective fee rate |
|---|---|---|
| $5 | $0.80 | 16% |
| $10 | $0.80 | 8% |
| $14.55 | $0.80 | 5.5% (break-even point) |
| $20 | $1.10 | 5.5% |
| $100 | $5.50 | 5.5% |
| $1,000 | $55.00 | 5.5% |
Below $14.55, the $0.80 floor applies, so topping up $5 at a time costs nearly three times the headline rate. Sales tax, VAT or GST is added on top where required. In an October r/openrouter thread, a user in India saw a $20 credit purchase come to $25.00 at checkout once a service fee and GST were added, and a commenter worked out that the tax had been charged on the fee as well as the credits. Two more rules affect what you pay: unused credits are refundable only within 24 hours of purchase and the platform fee is never refunded, and OpenRouter's terms let it expire unused credits one year after purchase.
BYOK: the cheapest way to use OpenRouter
With bring-your-own-key, you connect your own provider account, the provider bills you for inference directly, and OpenRouter charges nothing up to $25,000 of list-price inference a month on Standard and Business. Above that, it charges 5% of what the same request would cost at list price on OpenRouter, deducted from your OpenRouter credits, so you still need a credit balance even if every request uses your keys.
| Monthly list-price spend | Standard credits (5.5%) | Business credits (8%) | BYOK |
|---|---|---|---|
| $500 | $27.50 | $40.00 | $0 |
| $5,000 | $275 | $400 | $0 |
| $25,000 | $1,375 | $2,000 | $0 |
| $40,000 | $2,200 | $3,200 | $750 |
For anyone who already has accounts with the providers they use, BYOK under $25,000 a month means routing, fallbacks, logs and budgets at no fee. It also keeps whatever you have negotiated or earned directly with a provider, such as committed-use discounts or provider credits, because the provider is the one billing you. The limits you hit are your own provider limits; one r/openrouter user noted that during a traffic spike that exhausted their own key's limits, OpenRouter fell back to its own key and kept serving.
Free models and their limits
OpenRouter lists 25+ free models from 4 free providers. They are useful for prototyping, and OpenRouter itself says they are usually not suitable for production. The limits:
- 20 requests per minute on free models.
- 50 requests per day in total, rising to 1,000 per day once your account has bought at least $10 of credits.
- Failed attempts count toward the daily cap.
- A negative balance blocks free models until you add credits.
- On the Free plan there is no prompt caching and no budgets or spend controls.
The $10 threshold is the cheapest upgrade in this whole page: one $10 top-up (paying the $0.80 minimum fee) moves the free-model cap from 50 to 1,000 requests a day. We compare free tiers across providers in free AI APIs with real rate limits.
Paid rate limits and the in-flight budget
OpenRouter sets no plan-based rate limit on paid models. A 429 on a paid model normally comes from the provider, and fallback routing retries other providers; only very high bursts are rejected by OpenRouter's DDoS protection. Creating more accounts or keys does not raise limits, because capacity is governed globally.
There is one newer limit that surprises people: the in-flight spending budget. Because OpenRouter charges a request when it finishes, it estimates each paid request's cost up front (input tokens plus the completion allowed by max_tokens) and caps how much can be in flight at once as a fraction of your balance. A request that does not fit gets a 402 even with a positive balance. It applies to prepaid accounts below a balance threshold and, during rollout, to newer accounts, and not to free models or requests served entirely with your own keys. Setting a realistic max_tokens and keeping a larger balance both help. Failed attempts are not charged for model tokens, so with fallbacks you pay only for the run that answers; auxiliary services such as web search may still bill.
When OpenRouter costs less than going direct
- Same model, same provider, buying credits: never cheaper. You pay list price plus 5.5% (8% on Business), and more on top-ups under $14.55.
- BYOK under $25,000 a month: the same price as direct, with OpenRouter's routing, logging and budgets for free.
- Batch work: OpenRouter's Batch API, launched September 22, typically costs 50% (sometimes less) of the per-token price on more than 70 models, with BYOK batches paying only the BYOK fee. Many providers offer batch discounts directly too, so compare against the provider's own batch price rather than its standard price.
- Many small providers: one balance instead of a separate prepaid balance at each provider. Whether that saves money depends on how much would otherwise sit unused in each account.
- Business plan: costs 2.5 points more than Standard on every credit purchase, which is $250 a month at $10,000 of spend. It buys EU or US in-region routing, 1,000 workspaces and workload identity federation; if you need none of these, Standard is cheaper.
The gateway decision is usually not about the fee alone. If you route by task, as in our LLM router pattern, the savings from sending easy requests to a cheap model dwarf a 5.5% fee; if you only ever call one model, it is pure overhead. Our LLM gateway cost control guide covers budgets and per-key quotas in more depth. Model prices behind every route change often, and we log them daily in the AI price tracker.
What changed recently
- October 14: Private Endpoints, for bringing your own fine-tuned models and capacity to OpenRouter (an add-on on Enterprise).
- October 7: ElevenLabs text-to-speech and speech-to-text models added to the catalog.
- September 22: Batch API at roughly half price; OpenRouter reported a median completion time of 7 minutes during its beta.
- September 9: In-region routing for the US and EU, on Business and Enterprise.
- October, user reports: users in India reported GST appearing on credit purchases. OpenRouter's pricing page says prices exclude taxes and VAT or GST may be added.
OpenRouter's activity log tells you what each key spent, but not which of your customers or features caused it. If you resell model access or price AI features, attach a customer and feature to every request on your side. UsageBox meters those usage events and turns them into per-customer bill lines, whichever gateway the request went through.
Sources
Read on October 20, 2026: OpenRouter's pricing page and its billing FAQ; OpenRouter's documentation FAQ (fees, BYOK, credits, refunds) and Limits page (free-model limits, in-flight spending budget); OpenRouter's model catalog API for the per-model rates checked against xAI's and Anthropic's own pricing pages; OpenRouter's announcements for the Batch API, in-region routing, ElevenLabs and Private Endpoints. Community reports are from public r/openrouter threads posted in October 2026.