OpenRouter alternatives
OpenRouter is a solid hosted gateway: one API for many models, unified billing, good uptime. But it sits between you and every provider, meters you in credits, and its "no subscriptions" slogan means heavy users never get a flat rate. If you want provider-direct pricing, privacy, or a flat tool subscription instead, these are the four real alternatives.
1. Direct provider keys (BYOK)
Every major provider sells API access directly: DeepSeek, Groq, Google AI Studio, Mistral, and more. You create an account, generate a key, and pay the provider their listed price with zero markup. 22 of the 42 providers we track offer meaningful free tiers, so the direct route can literally cost nothing.
The catch used to be tooling: juggling keys, base URLs, and fallback logic by hand. That is the part we build. The Dracon key manager stores your keys encrypted, the chat and tools call providers straight from your browser, and the router builder exports fallback chains as configs for opencode and LiteLLM. Omni is a flat $15/month for the tools; the tokens stay between you and the provider.
- Cost: provider list price, nothing added
- Privacy: traffic never transits a third party
- Best for: anyone comfortable pasting an API key once
2. Self-hosted LiteLLM
LiteLLM is an open-source proxy you run yourself: one OpenAI-compatible endpoint in front of any mix of providers, with retries and fallbacks. It gives you OpenRouter-style routing without the hosted middleman, at the cost of running a process.
The friction is writing the config. Our router builder generates LiteLLM YAML from your provider list: pick hops, order them, export, run `litellm --config config.yaml`. The chain lives on your machine and the keys come from your own env vars.
- Cost: free software plus provider list price
- Privacy: full control, your infrastructure
- Best for: developers who want a local routing endpoint
3. First-party accounts with per-tool keys
Many tools (opencode, Claude Code, editor plugins) accept a direct provider key and base URL with no router at all. If you mostly use one or two providers, skipping the routing layer entirely is the simplest option: one key per tool, straight to the source.
Our provider setup guides walk through key creation for all 42 providers we track, with free-tier details and connection info for each.
- Cost: provider list price
- Privacy: direct
- Best for: single-provider workflows
4. Other hosted gateways
OpenRouter is not the only hosted gateway. Alternatives in the same category trade the same deal: convenience and one bill in exchange for your traffic flowing through their servers and per-use pricing. If you stay in this category, compare uptime pages and per-model pricing carefully; the structural trade-offs are identical.
- Cost: per-use, often with a spread over provider pricing
- Privacy: your prompts transit the gateway
- Best for: teams that value one invoice over everything else