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. As of its launch week, the platform listed 307 distinct models with no minimum spend requirement, and as of early 2026 processes more than 2.5 billion tokens daily. OpenRouter enables developers to compare models on latency, cost, and quality metrics via a real-time dashboard, without managing separate API keys or billing relationships. The service matters because it eliminates fragmentation in the LLM ecosystem, providing automatic fallback and cost-optimized routing that dynamically shifts traffic across models to maintain uptime or control expenditure, rather than locking applications into a single vendor.