OpenRouter alternatives in 2026: fees, credit expiry, and what each is for
OpenRouter alternatives compared on what you pay on top of the model price, whether credit expires, and what each is best at — with every fee taken from the vendor's own page.
OpenRouter is the default way to reach many models through one API. People look for an alternative for three reasons: the fee on credit purchases, credit that can expire, and wanting something narrower or broader. Here are the alternatives worth a look, with each vendor's terms as their own pages stated them on November 4, 2026. We are one of them, and we say where the others are a better fit.
What OpenRouter charges
From OpenRouter's pricing page and terms:
- Inference at the provider's list price.
- A platform fee when you buy credits: 5.5% on Standard, 8% on Business.
- Bring-your-own-key traffic free up to $25,000 of list-price usage a month, 5% above that.
- OpenRouter "reserves the right to expire unused credits three hundred sixty-five (365) days after purchase".
- No discounts on inference; fee discounts on Enterprise.
The alternatives
| Fee on top of model price | Credit expiry | Best for | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Requesty | 5% markup on model cost | Not stated on its pricing page | Teams that want governance and EU data residency |
| kie.ai | Credits priced per model | Never | Video, music and image generation |
| Going direct to each lab | None | Per lab | One or two labs, at list price |
| Inferray | None | Never | Frontier text and image models on one key, and coding agents |
Requesty
Requesty's pricing page says it charges "what your application spends, plus 5%" — a model that costs $10 per 1M tokens costs $10.50 — with a free tier of 200 requests a day on free models. It sells itself on routing, caching and EU data residency, with SSO and RBAC for enterprises.
kie.ai
kie.ai is built around media: one API for video, image, music and chat models, paid with credits that never expire, and "failed tasks are never charged". Its image and video generation runs as asynchronous tasks. If you need video or music, it does what we don't. Our comparison with kie.ai has the detail.
Going direct
Each lab sells its own API at list price with no fee on top. The cost is one account, one key and one bill per lab — and switching models means switching SDKs.
Inferray
Inferray serves Claude, GPT, Gemini, DeepSeek, GLM and Kimi, plus image models, on OpenAI- and Anthropic-compatible APIs:
- No gateway fees. A $100 top-up is $100 of credit.
- Credit never expires.
- Volume discounts for steady monthly spend.
- Token Plans for coding agents: $60 of usage for $20 a month, no 5-hour or weekly windows.
| Model | Input / 1M | Cached / 1M | Output / 1M | Context |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Claude Sonnet 5.5 | $2 | $0.1 | $10 | 1M |
| GPT-6.1 Sol | $2 | $0.1 | $10 | 1.1M |
| Gemini 3.8 Flash | $0.75 | $0.075 | $3.75 | 1.0M |
| DeepSeek V4.1 Flash | $0.15 | $0.003 | $0.6 | 1M |
What we don't have: OpenRouter's long tail of models, free models, or bring-your-own-key. If you need those, OpenRouter remains the better fit.
Prices on this page come from the model catalog and were current on November 12, 2026.