OpenRouter Pricing Basics

Overview

OpenRouter charges per token with separate rates for prompt (input) and completion (output) tokens. Prices are listed per token in the models API (multiply by 1M for per-million rates). Credits are prepaid with a 5.5% processing fee ($0.80 minimum). Free models are available for testing and low-volume use.

Prerequisites

• An OpenRouter API key (sk-or-v1-...) exported as OPENROUTER_API_KEY — see the openrouter-install-auth skill for setup
• curl and jq for the model-pricing and credit-balance queries
• Python 3.8+ with the OpenAI SDK plus the requests package for the cost-calculation and generation-endpoint snippets
• Prepaid credits for paid models — the public models/pricing endpoint needs no auth, but real completions require credits or a :free model

Instructions