How much does OpenRouter cost on each plan?
OpenRouter costs nothing to join and charges a 5.5% fee on the credits you buy on its Standard plan, or 8% on Business. You pay the model's own token price on top of that. We read every row from OpenRouter's pricing page on 8 November 2026:
| Plan | What you pay | Platform fee | Models | Bring your own key | Free model limit |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Free | $0 | None | 25+ free models from 4 free providers | Not listed | 20 requests a minute, 50 a day |
| Standard, pay as you go | Credits you buy | 5.5% of each credit purchase | 600+ models from 80+ providers | $25,000 a month of list-price usage free, then 5% | 1,000 a day after 10 credits bought |
| Business, pay as you go | Credits you buy | 8% of each credit purchase | Same as Standard, plus 1,000 workspaces and a signed DPA on request | $25,000 a month free, then 5% | 1,000 a day after 10 credits bought |
| Enterprise | Through sales | Fee discounts available | Private endpoints as an add-on, SSO and SAML, SLAs, invoicing | Custom | Higher allowances available |
Standard is the plan most people mean by "OpenRouter pricing." There's no seat fee, and the FAQ on the same page says "Standard and Business have no minimums and no lock-in." Business costs 2.5 points more per credit and adds team controls. You don't talk to sales for it, either: "There is no contract, no minimum spend, and no sales conversation."
Does OpenRouter mark up model prices?
No. OpenRouter charges the same per-token price as the model's maker, and its FAQ says "We pass through the pricing of the underlying model providers without any markup." We checked six models against Anthropic's and OpenAI's own price lists on 8 November 2026. Every one matched:
| Model, per 1M tokens in and out | On OpenRouter | At the maker | On OpenRouter after the 5.5% fee |
|---|---|---|---|
| Claude Opus 5.5 | $4 and $20 | $4 and $20 at Anthropic | $4.22 and $21.10 |
| Claude Sonnet 5.5 | $2 and $10 | $2 and $10 at Anthropic | $2.11 and $10.55 |
| Claude Haiku 5.5 | $0.10 and $0.50 | $0.10 and $0.50 at Anthropic | $0.11 and $0.53 |
| GPT-6 Astra | $10 and $50 | $10 and $50 at OpenAI | $10.55 and $52.75 |
| GPT-6.1 Sol | $2 and $10 | $2 and $10 at OpenAI | $2.11 and $10.55 |
| GPT-6 Luna | $0.10 and $0.50 | $0.10 and $0.50 at OpenAI | $0.11 and $0.53 |
So the real premium is the credit fee, and it works out to 5.5% on every token you buy with those credits. Here's what 1,000 short messages cost on popular OpenRouter models, fee included. We priced each message at 1,000 tokens in and 500 out, from OpenRouter's models API on 8 November 2026:
Two other price lines are easy to miss. The Claude and GPT models also have a ":batch" version on OpenRouter at half price, so Sonnet 5.5 drops to $1 and $5. And keeping requests inside the EU costs more and needs a Business or Enterprise plan: OpenRouter's Sonnet 5.5 page lists the EU in-region providers at $2.20 and $11. Our own Claude API pricing page has the full Anthropic list, with cache and Batch rates.
What does $100 of OpenRouter credit cost?
$100 of OpenRouter credit costs $105.50 on Standard and $108 on Business. The fee is added at checkout, and you get the full $100 to spend on tokens:
| Credits bought | You pay on Standard, 5.5% | You pay on Business, 8% |
|---|---|---|
| $10 | $10.80, the $0.80 minimum fee | $10.80 |
| $50 | $52.75 | $54 |
| $100 | $105.50 | $108 |
| $1,000 | $1,055 | $1,080 |
Small card top-ups cost more than 5.5%. OpenRouter's fee post, first published in June 2025 and last updated on 11 June 2026, sets card payments at "5.5% of the order amount, with a minimum fee of $0.80" and crypto at "5.0% flat, no minimum fee." The pricing page we read on 8 November 2026 prints only the 5.5% and 8% rates. At that floor, a $10 card top-up pays 8%, and you need to buy $14.55 or more to pay just 5.5%.
The fee doesn't come back. Per the FAQ, you can ask for a refund of unused credits within 24 hours, "the platform fees are non-refundable," and crypto payments are never refundable. OpenRouter also says it reserves "the right to expire unused credits after one year of purchase." So buy what you'll use in a year.
Which OpenRouter models are free?
OpenRouter's free models cost $0 per token and are capped at 50 requests a day, or 1,000 a day once you've bought at least 10 credits. Both tiers allow 20 requests a minute, per its rate limit docs. So a one-time $10 top-up, $10.80 with the minimum fee, lifts the free cap twentyfold.
The pricing page counts "25+ free models." When we pulled OpenRouter's public models API on 8 November 2026, it listed 12 models with a ":free" tag. They include Google's Gemma 4 31B and Gemma 4 26B, NVIDIA's Nemotron 3 Ultra 550B and Nemotron 3.5 Super VL, and Cohere's North Mini Code. One free stealth model, two free Lyria 3 music previews and the openrouter/free router sat outside that tag. The two counts don't match, so check the live list before you build on a free model.
One catch: a negative balance blocks free models too. The docs say that with a negative credit balance you may see errors "including for free models," until you add credits and get back above zero.
How does BYOK pricing work on OpenRouter?
Bring your own key (BYOK) is free on OpenRouter for the first $25,000 a month of usage, measured at OpenRouter's list price, and costs 5% after that. You pay the provider directly on your own key. The FAQ says usage above the allowance "has a fee of 5% of what the same model and provider would normally cost on OpenRouter," taken from your OpenRouter credits.
So BYOK beats credits at almost any size. Take a team that spends $2,000 a month on Claude Opus 5.5. On credits, it pays $2,110, since the 5.5% fee adds $110. On its own Anthropic key, it pays Anthropic $2,000 and OpenRouter nothing. A team running $30,000 a month at list price would pay 5% on the $5,000 above the allowance, or $250, against $1,650 in credit fees.
What BYOK doesn't change is the provider's price. You still pay Anthropic, OpenAI or Google their own rates, and you still need an account and limits with each of them.
What does a typical month on OpenRouter cost?
A month on OpenRouter costs about $6.65 for light personal chat on Claude Sonnet 5.5, about $37 for a small app on Claude Haiku 5.5, and $2,110 for a team agent on Opus 5.5. Here's the arithmetic, at list prices plus the 5.5% Standard fee:
| Workload, one month | Tokens | Price per 1M, in and out | Token cost | With the 5.5% fee |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 30 Claude Sonnet 5.5 chats a day, 1,000 in and 500 out | 0.9M in, 0.45M out | $2 and $10 | $6.30 | $6.65 |
| App with 100,000 Claude Haiku 5.5 requests | 100M in, 50M out | $0.10 and $0.50 | $35.00 | $36.93 |
| The same app on DeepSeek V4.1 Flash | 100M in, 50M out | $0.051 and $0.567 | $33.45 | $35.29 |
| Team agent, 20,000 Opus 5.5 runs of 20,000 in and 1,000 out | 400M in, 20M out | $4 and $20 | $2,000 | $2,110, or $2,000 with BYOK |
The chat row is light because each message is short. A real chat sends its whole history again on every turn, so a long thread costs several times more per message. The app rows hold a surprise: DeepSeek V4.1 Flash is half Haiku 5.5's input price, but its output costs more, so the two land within $2 of each other. Output-heavy apps should compare the output column first.
What does OpenRouter cost next to the rest of your AI stack?
OpenRouter is the cheapest line in most stacks, because it only bills what you send. A developer with the $36.93 Haiku app above, plus ChatGPT Plus at $20 and Claude Pro at $20 for their own chats, spends $76.93 a month. OpenAI's plan page and Anthropic's pricing page both showed $20 on 8 November 2026.
Whizi, which publishes this page, sets the credit price of each model from OpenRouter's per-token rates, so a model that costs more on OpenRouter costs more credits on Whizi. Whizi Pro costs $29.99 a month for 2,500 credits and puts Claude, ChatGPT and Gemini in one chat, plus pictures, video and music. That can replace the two $20 chat plans. It can't replace OpenRouter: Whizi has no API, so your app keeps its key. For light chat alone, $6.65 of OpenRouter credit is cheaper than any Whizi plan, if you're happy to bring a client. Whizi vs OpenRouter covers the rest of that choice.
- Buy credits in amounts you'll use within a year, since OpenRouter may expire them after one
- Attach your own provider key if you spend real money on one provider, since BYOK is fee-free to $25,000 a month
- Stay on Standard at 5.5% unless you need Business workspaces or a signed DPA
- Use the ":batch" model variants for work that can wait, at half the token price
- Buy 10 credits once if you use free models, which lifts the cap from 50 to 1,000 requests a day
- Keep the balance above zero, since a negative balance blocks free models as well
Frequently asked questions
Is OpenRouter free?
Partly. OpenRouter's free models cost $0 per token, with a cap of 50 requests a day, or 1,000 a day after you've bought 10 credits, as of November 2026. Every other model needs credits, which carry a 5.5% fee on Standard. Is it worth paying for AI helps if you only use AI now and then.
Is OpenRouter more expensive than using the API directly?
Yes, by the credit fee and nothing more: 5.5% on Standard, with a $0.80 minimum on each card purchase. Token prices match the maker's own: Claude Sonnet 5.5 is $2 in and $10 out per million tokens at both Anthropic and OpenRouter on 8 November 2026. With your own key, OpenRouter charges nothing up to $25,000 a month. LLM API pricing statistics shows what models charge across the market.
Is OpenRouter cheaper than ChatGPT Plus?
For light chat, yes. 900 short Claude Sonnet 5.5 messages a month cost $6.65 on OpenRouter credits, against $20 for ChatGPT Plus. Plus includes OpenAI's own apps, and OpenRouter gives you a model behind an API. ChatGPT pricing lists what each OpenAI plan includes.
Do OpenRouter credits expire?
They can. OpenRouter says it reserves "the right to expire unused credits after one year of purchase," and you can ask for a refund of unused credits only within 24 hours, without the fee. AI subscription costs helps you total what you spend across AI tools.
