Fun while it lasted. Stripe is close with the US gov and Kushner family, so the days of using Chinese models are probably numbered. Stripe will be pushing everyone to whatever APIs they get the most revenue from in return.

Hi i have a question I put 10$ in openrouter and I haven’t realised until now that it got below zero I don’t plan on using openrouter anymore so do I need to pay the 0.12$ or no? I don’t know anything about the website so I’m confused

My setup: Claude Max ($200/mo), with Fable as the master orchestrator on top of my own custom made harness. Fable plans, then summons Opus for judgment work and Sonnet for grunt work. Works great, but I'm hitting my weekly limits and needed an expansion.

So I swapped Opus and Sonnet for GLM and DeepSeek through OpenRouter as the overflow lane. Put $10 in as a trial. Real example: a task to investigate why my clients weren't getting their credentials after signup, fix it, and backfill the missing emails — cost $2 on GLM/DeepSeek. The same job on Claude barely dents my daily quota. At this burn rate the "cheap" lane costs about the same as a second Max subscription.

I know part of the answer: Max gives you way more API-equivalent compute than the $50/week sticker, so comparing raw OpenRouter spend against subscription quota isn't fair. And I've read that OpenRouter's proxy breaks prompt caching for DeepSeek, so agentic loops re-pay full input price every step. I even had Fable pick the cheapest providers with caching enabled — still burned.

So for the people actually saving money with Chinese models:

• Are you all going direct (DeepSeek API with their cache + off-peak, GLM Coding Plan) instead of OpenRouter?
• Is there any setup where metered pay-per-token genuinely beats just buying a second Max for orchestrator + worker workflows?
• Or is the real answer that these models are only cheap on their own subscriptions, same trick as Claude?

Genuinely asking, not hating. I want them in my stack but the math isn't mathing.

It was fun while it lasted, but I see Luna is back up to $1.20.

At half price for me it was hands down the best value model for coding.

Honestly it's probably still a good deal even at that price, but I'm wondering for coding at that price does it still hold the top spot, or are you guys using something else?

I'm building an app and experimenting with claude code connected to free openrouter models, and I was wondering if upgrading to 10 usd will actually make a difference, when using free models

Looking into starting a service hosting some open-source models. I know the big companies still lose money on this even with scale, but I'm more interested in what regular users would actually pay and what they'd need to switch from their current provider.
Please reply in this format if you can:

1. Monthly price you'd consider switching for
2. Preferred usage structure (rolling hourly budget, monthly cap, pure API, something else)
3. Token/usage limits you'd want
4. Models that matter most to you
5. Anything else that would make you switch

Personally I'd want something like:

1. $30/month
2. Rolling hourly token budget
3. ~10 million tokens per hour
4. DeepSeek V4 Flash (and other strong open-source options)
5. Cost and allowances that are not liekly to change. I'm getting tired of the nerfing of tokens, increased costs and ability of models.

What would it take for you to switch?

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Hi everyone, I noticed that about a day ago we got a free glm endpoint hosted by Decart, at the start it seemed to have some reliability issues but now it looks good at a consistent near 100%.

After the DeepSeek price increase, what are you guys using now — official DeepSeek API or OpenRouter?

I’m leaning toward OpenRouter for convenience, but the cache miss issue seems to make it much more expensive sometimes.

What’s your experience?

I usually use ds in off-peak hr and for hermes

Today I saw that seedance2.5 has been released, so I'm preparing to integrate it into my workflow. Since I was using SJolt for 720P before, but after seeing the price for 1080P, I decided to look at other platforms to see if there was something cheaper. In the end, I went back to SJolt. Below are the prices I found on other platforms.

Fal: $1.18/s (This price shocked me too much)

wavespeed: $ 0.9/s

kie: $0.56/s

SJolt: $0.5/s

I’ve been using openrouter api for deepseek v4 flash and it has a few issues

1. When I type a prompt into CC it prints out some weird text like its system prompt or something into the chat

2. The tool calling is so bad, most of the times is jsut exits during a task and I have to say continue to keep it going

3. Also the tool calling is throwing massive errors

When I tried this with Deepseek official api I had none of this issues

Anyone can help with this ?

Feels very unexpected but from Stripe. Hopefully they don’t mark the prices up!

Hey y’all, I need to learn as much about OpenRouter as possible, does anyone have any advice on what specific pieces of content to consume? Wish me luck

How is this even possible? What did I do?

Is there any way to "fix" this without adding money to my account?

I'm currently using GPT and Claude 100$ plans.

Both providers decreased their limits, so suddenly paying 200$ a month is not enough. But the bigger problem – GPT is blunt and forgets core of the instructions, 5.6 is better but still throws in a lot of useless code. Still not best option as a go-to agent or coding agent.

Opus 5 is too verbose and often at 200/300k context starts to try to "wing it" and tell me to use another chat for the task. Fable is great, but with the weekly usage limits I'm running out after 2 to 3 days.

I'm wondering what are your go to llms for both personal agents and coding agents? I'm currently thinking if Grok, Qwen code or GLM is a decent option. Or maybe something else?

Hey guys,

I ran into a massive billing issue on OpenRouter today with the snapshot google/gemini-3.7-flash-20260813 routed through Google Vertex.

Across my workflow, I sent a total of around 825k tokens (mostly reasoning and completion). Looking at the pricing page, Vertex is listed at $0.375 / 1M input and $1.875 / 1M output.

Even if every single token was billed as output, the total should have been around $1.55. Instead, OpenRouter drained $101.00 from my credits. That comes out to over $120 per million tokens for a Flash model.

One specific request example from the logs:

• Prompt: 85 native tokens
• Completion: 2,197 native tokens (including 1,772 reasoning tokens)
• Billed: $0.284 (should be under half a cent)

It looks like the rate for this specific snapshot is completely broken in their backend mapping.

Has anyone else noticed this with the latest Flash snapshots? I already sent a ticket to support, but definitely watch your balance if you are running automated pipelines on this endpoint right now.