---
title: "OpenRouter alternatives"
canonical: "https://router.xark.io/alternatives/openrouter"
description: "Where developers go when they leave OpenRouter, why, and which alternative fits each reason — including when staying is the right call."
section: "alternatives"
updated: "2026-09-02"
source: "https://router.xark.io/alternatives/openrouter.md"
---

# OpenRouter alternatives

Most people leaving OpenRouter are leaving one of three specific things: the ~5.5% fee on non-crypto credit purchases, the ~25–40ms routing hop, or the fact that cached-input rates are not surfaced uniformly across upstream providers. Which alternative is right depends entirely on which of the three you care about, and none of them replaces OpenRouter's 500-model catalogue.

## Why people leave

- A platform fee of roughly 5.5% is applied to credit purchases made by non-crypto methods, on top of whatever the underlying model costs.
- OpenRouter documents ~25–40ms of routing overhead per request, which is the price of the abstraction it provides.
- Cached-input pricing varies by upstream provider and is not surfaced uniformly, so on a repeated-prefix workload the largest line item is the hardest one to forecast.
- There are no video generation models in the catalogue, so a stack that generates video needs a second vendor regardless.

## The options

| Option | Best for | Trade-off |
| --- | --- | --- |
| AI Token Router | Leaving because of the credit-purchase fee or the cached-input opacity. We charge no platform fee, and the cached-input rate is a column on every pricing row rather than something that depends on which upstream served you. | Seven models callable today out of 24 catalogued, all open-weight. No GPT, Claude or Gemini, and one provider per model rather than multi-provider failover — if your architecture depends on failing over when an upstream degrades, we do not offer that. |
| Groq | Leaving because of the routing hop. Groq's speed comes from custom LPU silicon rather than a scheduling optimisation, at 500–1000 tokens/sec on their published models, and they ship Compound and Compound Mini with web search and code execution built in. | groq.com publishes no rate card. Rates for some models live in the console docs, and the flagship Llama models are marked "Enterprise pricing" with no public number, so you cannot price a workload before talking to someone. The production list is narrow: text models plus Whisper, with no image or video models. |
| DeepInfra | Leaving purely on per-token cost for text. DeepInfra runs its own GPU fleet and is frequently the lowest published rate on open text models, across a broader open-model catalogue than ours. | They publish their own rate only, so any comparison against the model's official price is work you do yourself. Video support is limited, spending controls are account-level rather than per key, and the time to add a newly released model varies. |
| Novita AI | Leaving the fee but not the breadth. Novita carries 200+ models across text, image, audio, video and vision, publishes no platform fee, and bills Kling v3.0 video on actual output length at $0.084–$0.168 per second. | Their homepage and pricing page disagree on DeepSeek V4 Pro ($1.74/$3.48 against $1.60/$3.20), and the headline saving claim is not broken out per model. There are six product surfaces on one account — serverless, dedicated endpoints, agent sandbox, GPU instances, serverless GPU and bare metal — which is more to learn than a single serverless API. |

## When to stay

Stay on OpenRouter if you call closed frontier models — GPT, Claude, Gemini — alongside open ones, or if provider failover is part of your availability story rather than a nice-to-have. Nothing on this list replaces 500 models across 80+ providers with automatic fallback, and a fee measured in single-digit percent is cheap next to running your own multi-provider routing layer. The routing overhead is also irrelevant to a batch job: ~25–40ms matters to a voice agent and rounds to nothing in a nightly pipeline.

## Migrating

Moving to any OpenAI-compatible endpoint is a base URL, a key and a model id. Point base_url at the new provider, swap the API key, and change the model string — our ids are namespaced provider/model-name, and the bare name is accepted too. What does not carry over is anything OpenRouter-specific: provider preference and fallback ordering have no equivalent on a single-provider endpoint, so remove those fields rather than translating them. Budget an afternoon to re-check streaming and tool-call handling against the new endpoint before you move production traffic.

## Where the two rate cards overlap

**Availability:** 7 of the 24 catalogued models are callable today. The rest are listed at their intended rate but no configured upstream serves them, so a request naming one returns `no available channel`. Every table below marks which is which.

| Model | AI Token Router input | AI Token Router output | OpenRouter input | OpenRouter output |
| --- | --- | --- | --- | --- |
| Kimi K2.6 | $0.55/M | $2.30/M | $0.92/M | $3.88/M |
| Kimi K3 | $1.85/M | $9.00/M | $2.94/M | $14.70/M |
| GLM-5.2 | $0.82/M | $2.55/M | $1.36/M | $4.27/M |
| DeepSeek V4 Pro | $0.28/M | $0.55/M | $0.42/M | $0.85/M |
| DeepSeek V4 Flash | $0.090/M | $0.18/M | $0.14/M | $0.27/M |
| Qwen3 Embedding 8B | $0.030/M | — | $0.048/M | — |

## Questions

### Is there an OpenRouter alternative with no platform fee?

Several. We charge no platform fee and no minimum spend, and Novita AI, Replicate and Fireworks AI all publish none either. OpenRouter's ~5.5% applies to credit purchases made by non-crypto methods, so if you are comparing totals, apply it to the credit purchase rather than to each request.

### Which alternative is fastest?

Groq, and not by a small margin — 500–1000 tokens/sec on their published models, from custom LPU silicon rather than tuning. The trade-off is that groq.com publishes no rate card and their flagship Llama models carry no public price at all, so speed comes before cost certainty rather than alongside it.

### Can I get closed models like GPT-4 or Claude elsewhere on this list?

No. Every provider surveyed here serves open-weight models. If closed frontier models are part of your workload, OpenRouter is doing something for you that none of these alternatives do, and the honest answer is to stay or to run two providers.

### What about video generation?

OpenRouter carries no video models. Among the alternatives here, Novita AI and Replicate both bill video on actual output length — Novita at $0.084–$0.168 per second for Kling v3.0, Replicate at $0.09/sec for Wan 2.1 at 480p and $0.25/sec at 720p. We publish per-second rates but bill every clip at a fixed five-second duration during rollout, which is worse than either of them for short clips.

[Head to head: AI Token Router vs OpenRouter](https://router.xark.io/compare/openrouter.md)