OpenRouter Rate Limits

Overview

OpenRouter rate limits are per-key, not per-account. Free tier keys get lower limits; paid keys get higher limits that scale with credit balance. The OpenAI SDK has built-in retry with exponential backoff for 429 responses. Check your current limits via GET /api/v1/auth/key. Rate limit headers are returned on every response.

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 querying your key's limits from GET /api/v1/auth/key
• Python 3.8+ with the OpenAI SDK (sync OpenAI and AsyncOpenAI) plus the requests package for reading rate-limit headers directly
• Awareness of your tier: free keys get 20 req/10s, keys with any credits 200 req/10s (see Rate Limit Tiers)

Instructions