OpenRouter pricing and credits

OpenRouter’s FAQ describes credits as deposits used for inference. The balance is denominated in US dollars. You can top up manually or turn on auto top-up when the balance falls under a threshold you set.

The fee is on the purchase

A $10 card purchase therefore does not put $10 of inference on the account. The 5.5 percent fee is taken when you buy credits. After that, a model listed at $0.35 per million input tokens bills $0.35 per million input tokens.

Three balances that can return 402

• Account credits. A negative balance can block even free models until you add enough to go above zero.
• Per-key limit. Optional cap on one key, visible from GET /api/v1/key as limit, limit_reset, and limit_remaining.
• In-flight budget. OpenRouter estimates the token cost of requests still running and can reject a new paid call before your settled balance hits zero.

Promo codes

The discounted-models collection is a catalog filter for lower rates. It is not a coupon field. The pricing page does not publish a standing public promo code. Any code that appears in a forum post should be treated as unofficial until OpenRouter shows it at checkout.

Rates in the model tables on this site were read from openrouter.ai on 27 Sep 2026. The provider row on the model page is the figure to use before a large job.