OpenRouter
The unified LLM gateway — one API for 300+ models with fallback routing.
About
OpenRouter (2023) is the unified LLM gateway: one API for 300+ models (OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, open weights) with automatic fallbacks, load balancing, and pay-as-you-go pricing.
Commercial: usage-based (per-token, varies by model). The "don't get locked in" API — switch models without code changes, route around outages, and compare costs. For agents and apps that need model flexibility, OpenRouter is the default gateway. The activity feed and model rankings are useful market signals.
What it can do
- • One API for 300+ LLMs\n• Automatic fallbacks and routing\n• Pay-as-you-go per-token pricing\n• OpenAI-compatible endpoints\n• Usage analytics and rankings\n• No lock-in
Setup
- Sign up at https://openrouter.ai and get an API key.\n2. Use the OpenAI-compatible endpoint:
https://openrouter.ai/api/v1.\n3. Setmodelto any supported model ID; configure fallbacks.
Prerequisites
An OpenRouter account; credits (pay-as-you-go).
Use cases
Works with
Trust score — 8/10
Scored 8/10 (verified tier). The default LLM gateway with 300+ models, automatic fallbacks, and transparent pricing. Docked two points: (1) adds a dependency hop — latency and an extra point of failure; (2) pricing varies by model. For model flexibility.
How the trust score is built
Full methodology →- Adoption · stars/downloads, log-scaled vs peers
- 10.0/10
- Maintenance · recency, releases, issue load
- 5.0/10
- Openness · license + docs
- 4.8/10
- Manual review · sanity read + red-flag check
- 9.0/10
- · provider-tier estimate — thinner evidence (no public adoption metric)
- · default LLM gateway; 300+ models; transparent pricing
- · no release date — neutral maintenance score
- · manual review: adds a hop; for model flexibility; license: proprietary — usage-based gateway
Sources
Every fact above was checked against these sources. Where a claim comes from the provider and couldn't be independently verified, the text says so.