Introduction to OpenRouter

Discover how OpenRouter gives you unified access to 200+ AI models from every major provider through a single API endpoint. No more juggling multiple API keys and SDKs.

What is OpenRouter?

OpenRouter (openrouter.ai) is a unified API gateway that provides access to over 200 AI models from multiple providers through a single API. Instead of managing separate accounts, API keys, and SDKs for each AI provider, you use one OpenRouter API key to access them all.

Think of OpenRouter as a router for AI models - just like a network router directs traffic to the right destination, OpenRouter routes your API requests to the right AI provider, handling authentication, rate limits, and failover automatically.

Why Use OpenRouter?

There are several compelling reasons to use OpenRouter instead of connecting to each AI provider directly:

• One API key for all models: Access Claude, GPT-4o, Gemini, Llama, Mixtral, and hundreds more with a single API key. No need to create accounts and manage billing with each provider separately.
• Automatic fallbacks: If one provider is down or rate-limited, OpenRouter can automatically route your request to an alternative provider hosting the same model.
• Competitive pricing: OpenRouter aggregates pricing across providers and often offers competitive rates. Some models are even available for free.
• Usage tracking: Monitor all your AI spending and usage across every model from a single dashboard. No more checking multiple billing pages.
• OpenAI-compatible: The API follows the OpenAI chat completions format, making it a drop-in replacement for any OpenAI-compatible tool or library.
• Model discovery: Easily explore and compare models you might not have tried. Switch between models by changing a single parameter.

Supported Providers

OpenRouter aggregates models from all major AI providers and many open-source model hosts:

OpenRouter vs. Direct Provider APIs

Here is how using OpenRouter compares to connecting to each provider directly:

Common Use Cases

OpenRouter is widely used across different scenarios:

Development & Prototyping

Quickly test different models to find the best one for your use case. Switch between Claude, GPT-4o, and Gemini with a single parameter change. Use free models during development to avoid costs.

AI Coding Assistants

Tools like Cline, Kilocode, and Continue.dev support OpenRouter as a provider. This lets you use any of 200+ models with these tools, not just the ones they natively support.

Production Applications

Build production apps that leverage automatic failover, rate limit handling, and multi-provider redundancy. If Anthropic's API is down, OpenRouter can route your Claude requests through an alternative provider.

Cost Optimization

Route different tasks to different models based on complexity. Use a cheap, fast model for simple tasks and a powerful model for complex reasoning - all through the same API.

# Same API format, different models - just change the model ID

# Use Claude
model: "anthropic/claude-sonnet-4"

# Use GPT-4o
model: "openai/gpt-4o"

# Use Gemini
model: "google/gemini-2.5-pro"

# Use a free model
model: "meta-llama/llama-4-scout"