OpenRouter
the default, and the only one whose catalogue is the product
genuine pass-through pricing on inference with no subscription, undercut slightly by a card fee that most comparisons never mention.
openrouter is the closest thing this category has to a default. one openai-format endpoint, one key, and a catalogue that reaches essentially every commercial model plus a large free tier of open-weight ones. claude sonnet 4.5 lists at $3 per million input tokens — anthropic's own price, passed through unchanged. the faq is explicit that it passes provider pricing through 'without any markup on inference pricing'.
the fee that matters sits one step earlier. funding your credit balance by card costs 5.5% with an $0.80 minimum, so $100 of usable credit costs $105.50 and that $3 model effectively becomes $3.17. it is still cheaper than requesty's honest 5% on spend, and it disappears entirely if you bring your own provider keys — but byok itself starts charging 5% once you pass the monthly allowance.
the description above is ours, condensed from the ranking. pricing moves — check it on the vendor's own page before you rely on it.
- category
- llm gateways
- pricing
- $0 — no platform fee
- website
- openrouter.ai
genuine pass-through pricing on inference with no subscription, undercut slightly by a card fee that most comparisons never mention.
we researched this category against vendors' own pricing pages and licence files. that is where this line comes from — not from the vendor, and not from anything they paid for.