OpenRouter

OpenRouter is a unified API that gives developers a single endpoint for calling large language models from more than 70 providers, including Anthropic, OpenAI, Meta, and Google, instead of managing separate accounts and SDKs for each one. The API is compatible with the OpenAI SDK, so existing integrations can often switch providers with a minimal code change, and OpenRouter adds automatic routing and fallback between providers to improve uptime when a given model or provider has an outage. Custom data policies let teams control which providers are allowed to process their prompts. Billing runs on a prepaid credit system that can be spent across any supported model, rather than requiring separate subscriptions per provider, and the platform publishes price and performance comparisons to help developers pick a cost-effective model for a given task. OpenRouter reports serving over 200 trillion tokens a month and more than 10 million users, with connections into roughly 250,000 downstream applications. OpenRouter, Inc. was founded in 2023 by Alex Atallah, a co-founder of the NFT marketplace OpenSea. Because it is a routing layer rather than a model provider itself, output quality and behavior ultimately depend on the underlying third-party models it connects to.