OpenRouter

OpenRouter is a unified API gateway and model-routing platform that provides access to over 300 large language models from multiple providers, first publicly documented on 2026-03-14. It aggregates models from OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, Meta, Mistral, and numerous open-source repositories, offering a single endpoint with standardized pricing and formatting. The service incorporates a competitive ranking system, with models scored on a proprietary 'throughput' metric; for example, as of its initial documentation, Google's Gemini 2.0 Flash achieved a throughput score of 5, while Meta's Llama 4 fell to a score of 1, directly informing its routing logic. As of early 2026, the platform processes more than 2.5 billion tokens daily with no minimum spend requirement. OpenRouter matters because it eliminates fragmentation in the LLM ecosystem, using live benchmarking and automatic fallback to dynamically shift traffic across models for uptime and cost control, rather than locking applications into a single vendor.