AI cost calculator
OpenRouter pricing calculator
OpenRouter bills every model at the provider's list price and charges its fee when you buy credits: 5.5% on Standard and 8% on Business. With your own provider keys (BYOK) the first $25,000 of list-price usage a month has no fee. Enter a workload to see what the router adds.
Your inputs
Result
$2,247 a month through OpenRouter
$2,130 of Claude Sonnet 5.5 at list price plus $117.15 of OpenRouter fees (Standard).
- Model usage at list price
- $2,130 a month
- OpenRouter fee
- $117.15 a month5.5% on credit purchases
- Total per month
- $2,247
- Total per year
- $26,966
- Fee as a share of the bill
- 5.2%
Worked examples
Each row is the calculator run on the inputs shown, with every other input at its default.
| Workload | Paying by | Model usage | Fee | Total |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Side project | Standard | $42.60 a month | $2.34 a month | $44.94 |
| Production app | Standard | $2,130 a month | $117.15 a month | $2,247 |
| Production app on Business | Business | $2,130 a month | $170.40 a month | $2,300 |
| Production app, own keys | BYOK | $2,130 a month | $0.00 a month | $2,130 |
| Large app, own keys | BYOK | $42,600 a month | $880.00 a month | $43,480 |
| Cheap model at scale | Standard | $5,436 a month | $298.98 a month | $5,735 |
How it is calculated
OpenRouter does not mark up token prices: every request is billed at the provider's list price. Its fee depends on how you pay.
On Standard and Business you buy credits and each request draws them down; the fee is charged on the purchase, not per request, so it equals 5.5% or 8% of what you spend. Business adds admin controls, data-policy routing and other team features. With bring-your-own-key, the first $25,000 of list-price inference each month has no fee.
Model prices come from the same provider price list as the other Mode VC calculators. DeepSeek models are shown at the peak price; OpenRouter routes to the provider and its list price.
Questions
Does OpenRouter charge more than the provider?
Not per token. OpenRouter bills inference at the provider's list price on every plan. It charges a fee on credit purchases: 5.5% on Standard and 8% on Business.
What is the OpenRouter BYOK fee?
With your own provider keys, the first $25,000 of list-price inference each month has no fee, and 5% applies after that. The provider bills the usage to you directly.
Is there a free OpenRouter plan?
Yes. The Free plan has 25 or more free models from four providers, with 50 requests a day.
When is OpenRouter worth the fee?
When one API key, automatic failover between providers and switching models without code changes save more engineering time than 5.5% of your model spend.
Sources
- OpenRouter: Pricing, checked 2026-10-29
- Anthropic: Claude API pricing, checked 2026-10-29
- OpenAI: API pricing, checked 2026-10-29
Prices and plans change. This page was last checked on 2026-10-29. The data is open: ai-plans.json, llm-prices.json (CC BY 4.0).