OpenRouter alternatives: AI gateway fees, Sep 2026
Of five OpenRouter alternatives, checked 28 September 2026, Vercel AI Gateway publishes the lowest fee on model spend: no markup and no platform fee on tokens, against OpenRouter's 5.5% Standard fee. Requesty and Cloudflare Unified Billing take 5%.
Of five OpenRouter alternatives compared on published fees, checked 28 September 2026, Vercel AI Gateway charges the least on model spend: no markup and no platform fee on tokens.1 OpenRouter’s Standard plan charges a 5.5% platform fee.2 Requesty adds 5% to model spend.3 Cloudflare AI Gateway charges 5% on credits bought through Unified Billing.4 Portkey charges by recorded logs, at $49 a month for Production.5 LiteLLM’s open-source gateway is free to self-host, and you run the servers.6
TL;DR
- On $10,000 a month of model spend bought through the gateway, the published fees come to $0 on Vercel AI Gateway, $500 on Requesty or Cloudflare Unified Billing, $550 on OpenRouter Standard and $800 on OpenRouter Business.1,3,4,2 The OpenRouter figures assume its percentage applies to the whole spend.
- Your own provider keys change the order. OpenRouter charges no fee on the first $25,000 a month of list-price inference through your own keys, then 5%.2 Vercel charges no fee on your own keys but requires purchased credits first.1
- Portkey and LiteLLM list no fee on model spend. Portkey sells log volume, and LiteLLM’s core gateway is MIT-licensed and free.5,6
- Portkey and LiteLLM are the only two of the five with a published self-hosted option.5,6 The Vercel, Cloudflare and Requesty pricing pages list none.
- Vercel’s zero markup covers tokens. Team-wide zero data retention adds $0.10 per 1,000 requests, which is $100 a month at one million requests.1
- The gateway fee is one line of the bill. The token rate, and how many tokens each task burns, sets the rest, as our explainer on what controls AI inference cost sets out.
How this comparison was built
Glamdring Research selected five gateways: Portkey, Vercel AI Gateway, Cloudflare AI Gateway, Requesty and self-hosted LiteLLM. OpenRouter’s own pricing page sets the baseline. We captured eight company pages on 28 September 2026: one pricing page for each hosted gateway and OpenRouter, plus LiteLLM’s home page, enterprise page and GitHub repository.
Each gateway gets the same four fields. They are the pricing model, the published fee on model spend, the bring-your-own-key (BYOK) terms and the self-hosted option. No single published field prices all five. Three gateways take a share of spend, Portkey sells log volume and LiteLLM’s core gateway is free. So this is a comparison, and the table groups gateways by how they charge.
Every figure appears as its page prints it, in dollars. None of the pages states tax treatment beside its fee. The $10,000 and one-million-request examples are Glamdring’s arithmetic on the listed rates. These are company statements about company prices, which is how our research methodology treats them. The gateways sit in our model infrastructure coverage.
What does each OpenRouter alternative charge?
Vercel AI Gateway publishes a 0% fee on model spend, Requesty and Cloudflare AI Gateway publish 5%, and Portkey and LiteLLM publish no fee on model spend. OpenRouter, the baseline, charges 5.5% on Standard and 8% on Business.2 Vercel describes its product as a managed gateway.1 LiteLLM runs on your own servers.7
| Gateway | Pricing model | Published fee on model spend | Free entry point | Bring your own key | Self-hosted option |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| OpenRouter (baseline) | Platform fee on pay-as-you-go plans | 5.5% Standard, 8% Business | 25+ free models, 50 requests a day | First $25,000 a month of list-price inference fee-free, then 5% | None listed |
| Vercel AI Gateway | Provider list price, paid from prepaid credits | 0%: “no markup and no platform fee on tokens” | $5 monthly credit, Free Tier models only | Paid tier only, no fee | None listed |
| Cloudflare AI Gateway | Core features free; fee on Unified Billing credits | 5% on Unified Billing credits | Core features free on all plans | Not named on the pricing page | None listed |
| Requesty | Markup on model spend | 5% | Free models, 200 requests a day | Listed on Pay as you go | None listed |
| Portkey | Subscription priced by recorded logs | None listed | Developer: 10,000 recorded logs a month | Virtual keys and key management listed | Open-source “Host it Yourself” tier; private cloud and VPC on Enterprise |
| LiteLLM | Free open-source gateway; paid Enterprise licence | None listed | Open source: $0, “Free forever” | Keys stay in your own infrastructure | Yes, including air-gapped |
Each row comes from that operator’s own page, checked 28 September 2026.2,1,4,3,5,8,6
Vercel prices every request at the provider’s list price and deducts it from a credit balance.1 Its free tier gives each team $5 of credit a month on a subset of models. Buying credits moves the team to the paid tier and ends that monthly credit.1 Vercel also leaves any payment processing fees with the customer.1
Cloudflare’s example states its fee basis plainly: a $100 credit purchase results in a $105 charge.4 Provider inference then passes through at the provider’s own per-token rate.4 Dashboard analytics, caching and rate limiting are free on every plan.4
Requesty states its fee the same way. A model that costs $10 per million tokens from OpenAI costs $10.50 through Requesty.3 It lists no per-seat price and no minimum spend. Routing, caching and EU data residency come with every plan.3
Portkey prices its plans by recorded logs. Production costs $49 a month for 100,000 recorded logs, with 30 days of log retention.5 The free Developer plan records 10,000 logs a month and keeps them for three days. Portkey calls it “Not suitable for production workloads.”5
What does the fee cost at $10,000 a month of model spend?
At $10,000 a month of model spend bought through the gateway, the published fees run from $0 on Vercel AI Gateway to $800 on OpenRouter’s Business plan. The Requesty and Cloudflare rows follow each company’s own worked example.3,4 The OpenRouter rows assume its platform fee applies to the whole $10,000, since its table gives the percentage without the calculation.2
| Gateway and plan | Published fee rule | Fee on $10,000 | Total paid |
|---|---|---|---|
| Vercel AI Gateway, paid tier | 0% on tokens | $0 | $10,000, plus any payment processing fees |
| Requesty, Pay as you go | Spend plus 5% | $500 | $10,500 |
| Cloudflare AI Gateway, Unified Billing | 5% on credits purchased | $500 | $10,500 |
| OpenRouter, Standard | 5.5% platform fee | $550 | $10,550 |
| OpenRouter, Business | 8% platform fee | $800 | $10,800 |
Portkey needs a different unit, because its price follows log volume. Production includes 100,000 recorded logs and charges $9 for each further 100,000 requests.5 At one million requests a month, that is $49 plus nine overage blocks of $9, or $130. The plan comparison caps that overage at 3 million requests.5
A 5% fee reaches $130 at $2,600 of monthly spend. Above that level, Portkey’s flat price costs less than a 5% gateway, provided Portkey adds no charge on tokens. Its pricing page lists none.5 The comparison turns on your ratio of spend to requests. Cheap, high-volume calls favour a percentage fee. Expensive calls at modest volume favour a flat one.
BYOK moves OpenRouter down the table. At $10,000 a month of list-price inference through your own keys, OpenRouter charges nothing.2 At $40,000, the first $25,000 stays fee-free and 5% of the remaining $15,000 comes to $750.
Which gateways let you bring your own provider keys?
Vercel AI Gateway, Requesty and OpenRouter name BYOK on their pricing pages, and Vercel is the only one that states no fee on it at every volume.1 Portkey lists virtual keys and key management.5 LiteLLM keeps keys inside your own deployment.8 Cloudflare’s pricing page does not mention BYOK.
Vercel’s terms carry two conditions. BYOK sits on the paid tier, so you need purchased AI Gateway Credits to use your own keys.1 And when a request with your credentials fails, Vercel retries it with its own credentials and charges that fallback against your credits.1 A provider outage on your key can therefore land on your Vercel balance.
OpenRouter publishes a dollar threshold for fee-free BYOK. Standard and Business accounts get $25,000 of list-price inference a month with no fees, then pay 5%. Enterprise raises the allowance to $200,000 a month.2 The free plan has no BYOK allowance.2
Requesty lists “Bring your own keys” on its Pay as you go plan.3 Its page does not say whether the 5% markup applies to traffic on your own keys. Confirm this in the current quote before routing high-volume BYOK traffic through it.
LiteLLM’s enterprise page describes a gateway “that runs in your own infrastructure, so your data and your keys never leave it.”8 Cloudflare’s page ties its 5% fee to credits bought through Unified Billing.4 It names no separate path for your own keys, so confirm it in Cloudflare’s product documentation.
Which OpenRouter alternatives can you self-host?
LiteLLM and Portkey are the two alternatives with a published self-hosted option. LiteLLM’s open-source gateway is MIT-licensed and free.6 Portkey offers an open-source tier labelled “Host it Yourself”.5 The Vercel, Cloudflare and Requesty pricing pages list no self-hosted version.
LiteLLM describes itself as an “Open Source AI Gateway for 100+ LLMs. Self-hosted. Enterprise-ready.”7 The free tier includes virtual keys, budgets, teams, load balancing, rate limits and guardrails.6 Its home page says “the open-source gateway is MIT-licensed and production-grade. Enterprise adds SSO, RBAC, audit logs, and support on top, not a different core.”6 Enterprise pricing is custom and goes through sales.8 The enterprise tier supports self-hosted and air-gapped deployment.8 The repository showed 59.7k stars and 11.8k forks on the capture date.7
Portkey’s self-hosted tier lists a universal API, retries and timeouts, routing, guardrails, automatic fallbacks, load balancing and a basic dashboard, with community support.5 The plan comparison shows no monthly request limit for it.5 Portkey Enterprise adds private cloud deployment and VPC hosting at custom pricing.5
The constraint moves when you self-host. The licence costs nothing, and the servers, database, upgrades and on-call time become yours. Neither LiteLLM nor Portkey publishes what that infrastructure costs. Use one month of real traffic to test that cost against the $500 a 5% gateway would take on $10,000 of spend.
What do Vercel, Cloudflare and Portkey charge beyond the headline fee?
Vercel AI Gateway and Cloudflare AI Gateway both charge for optional features outside the token price, and Portkey’s free plan limits logging. Vercel’s surcharges come off the AI Gateway Credits balance once a team enables them.1 Cloudflare’s log pricing changed for gateways created on or after 24 September 2026.4
Vercel lists these add-ons on its pricing page, last updated 8 September 2026:1
| Vercel add-on | Price | Availability |
|---|---|---|
| Custom Reporting writes | $0.075 per 1,000 tag, user ID or quota entity ID writes | Not stated |
| Custom Reporting queries | $5 per 1,000 queries | Not stated |
| Team-wide provider allowlist | $0.10 per 1,000 successful requests | Pro and Enterprise |
| Team-wide zero data retention | $0.10 per 1,000 requests | Pro and Enterprise |
| AI Gateway Traces | $0.05 per 1,000 traces | Pro and Enterprise |
| Trace egress | $0.50 per GB | Pro and Enterprise |
The per-request versions of the provider filter and zero data retention cost nothing extra.1 A team that sets both controls team-wide adds $200 a month at one million successful requests.
Cloudflare customers who created their first gateway on or after 24 September 2026 follow Workers Logs pricing.4 Earlier customers keep Legacy Logs, with 100,000 logs in total on Workers Free and 10,000,000 logs per gateway on Workers Paid.4 Logpush on Workers Paid includes 10 million requests a month, then costs $0.05 per million.4 Guardrails bill as Workers AI inference, while DLP scanning is free on all plans.4
Portkey’s free plan handles overflow by dropping logs. Requests beyond 10,000 a month still run, and only the logs beyond the limit go unrecorded.5
What the comparison cannot tell you
The six operators’ published fees are company statements about their own prices. No fee figure measures latency, uptime, failover quality or the models each gateway carries. Model counts are self-reported and inconsistent even within one company. LiteLLM’s home page claims 140+ providers and 1,800+ models.6 Its repository says 100+ LLM providers.7 OpenRouter lists 500+ models and 80+ providers on its paid plans.2
Five terms stay open on the pages we captured. OpenRouter does not show the base its 5.5% applies to. Requesty does not say whether its 5% applies to BYOK traffic. Cloudflare’s pricing page does not name BYOK. None of the pages states tax treatment. Enterprise and volume terms go through sales at all six operators.2,1,4,3,5,8
Portkey’s page also carries a banner: “Portkey is now PRISMA AIRS AI Gateway, generally available for all enterprises.”5 Its Production upgrade button links to Palo Alto Networks.5 Confirm which company you contract with and whether the $49 plan remains on sale.
The decision changes when a gateway republishes its fee, or when your spend-to-request ratio moves across the $2,600 line. Confirm this in the current quote, filing or operating data. More of our model and infrastructure analysis sits in the research archive.
Frequently asked questions
Is OpenRouter API free?
OpenRouter has a free plan with no platform fee, limited to 25+ free models from four free providers at 50 requests a day.2 The free plan excludes budgets, prompt caching and BYOK allowances.2 Paid models need the Standard plan, which carries a 5.5% platform fee and passes rate limits through from the providers.2
Is LiteLLM similar to OpenRouter?
LiteLLM and OpenRouter both put many model providers behind one API. LiteLLM calls 100+ providers in the OpenAI format.7 OpenRouter reaches 80+ providers on its paid plans.2 The operating model differs. LiteLLM is open-source software you host yourself at no licence cost.6 OpenRouter is a hosted service that charges a platform fee of 5.5% on Standard.2
Is Portkey still sold as Portkey?
Portkey’s pricing page says Portkey is now Prisma AIRS AI Gateway, generally available for enterprises.5 The page still lists Developer, Production at $49 a month and Enterprise plans, alongside the open-source tier.5 Confirm the contracting company and plan availability before you buy.
Does Vercel AI Gateway charge when my own key fails?
Vercel AI Gateway charges for the retry. When a request with your credentials fails, Vercel retries it with system credentials and charges that fallback usage against your credits balance.1 BYOK requests that succeed carry no markup or fee from Vercel.1
Sources checked
Company-owned pages establish what a company says. They do not prove a market conclusion. Each source is dated so readers can judge each claim.
