How much does OpenRouter cost for a coding agent?
OpenRouter bills each model at its provider's price with no markup and adds a 5.5% fee (minimum $0.80) when you buy credits on the pay-as-you-go Standard plan, or 8% on Business. With your own provider keys, the first $25,000 a month of list-price inference has no fee, then 5%. For a coding agent the bill follows usage: a median coding month from our Agent Burn Index costs about $74 on Claude Sonnet 5.5 through OpenRouter, and a busy month about $611.
OpenRouter fees by plan
The fee is charged when you buy credits, not per request. Every model is then billed at the rate its provider sets, the same rate you would pay the provider directly.
| Plan | Fee on credit purchases | Budgets and spend controls | EU or US in-region routing | Rate limits |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Free | None (25+ free models only) | No | No | 50 requests a day |
| Standard | 5.5%, $0.80 minimum | Yes | No | Passed through from providers |
| Business | 8% | Yes | Yes | Passed through from providers |
| Enterprise | Discounts available | Yes | Yes | Higher allowances |
From openrouter.ai/pricing and the OpenRouter FAQ, checked October 13, 2026. Crypto purchases carry a 5% fee.
Bring your own key: free up to $25,000 a month
With BYOK you attach your own Anthropic, OpenAI or other provider keys and pay those providers directly. On Standard and Business the first $25,000 a month of inference, measured at list price, carries no OpenRouter fee. Above that, OpenRouter deducts 5% of what the same requests would have cost on OpenRouter from your credits. Enterprise allowances are custom.
BYOK spend does not count toward OpenRouter budget limits unless you turn on the Include BYOK spend setting, so a key limit alone will not cap a BYOK agent.
Free models and their limits
Free model variants (IDs ending in :free) are limited to 20 requests a minute. Until you have bought $10 of credits in total, they are also limited to 50 requests a day; after that the daily limit is 1,000. A coding agent that sends a request per tool call reaches 50 within a short session, which is why free-tier agents hit OpenRouter 429 errors so often.
Credits: expiry and refunds
- OpenRouter reserves the right to expire unused credits one year after purchase.
- Unused credits can be refunded within 24 hours of purchase. After that they are non-refundable, platform fees are never refunded, and crypto payments are never refundable.
- Each API key can carry a credit limit that resets daily, weekly or monthly, and guardrails add budgets per member and per key. A blocked request gets an error response; it does not wait.
Auto Router and Pareto Router: what they optimize
OpenRouter can pick the model for you. openrouter/auto classifies each prompt into one of about 30 task types and ranks models by what the OpenRouter community spent on for that task over the trailing 7 days, then applies the cost band you set (cost_tier from low to max). openrouter/pareto-code keeps a shortlist of coding models and picks the cheapest one above a single min_coding_score you choose; OpenRouter says it adds no fee.
Both are useful. The trade-off for agents: Auto follows what other people spend on, and Pareto applies one quality floor to every request, so an easy file read and a hard refactor get the same bar.
What a coding-agent month costs on OpenRouter
These figures come from the Agent Burn Index: coding-agent requests on the Standard Compute gateway from September 13 to October 12, 2026, priced at the model's list price. A median active day was 94 requests and 8.5M tokens; a busy day (the 90th percentile) was 491 requests and 86.7M tokens. A month here is 20 active days.
| Month | Model cost at list price | On OpenRouter, with the 5.5% fee | Standard Compute plan that covers it |
|---|---|---|---|
| Median, Claude Sonnet 5.5 on every request | $70.60 | $74.48 | Standard, $89 (budget $95) |
| Median, Claude Opus 5.5 on every request | $141.20 | $148.97 | Pro, $249 (budget $269) |
| Busy, Claude Sonnet 5.5 on every request | $579.40 | $611.27 | Growth, $999 (budget $1,119) |
One credit purchase a month assumed. Cache reads are 87% of coding-agent input tokens and are priced at the cache-read rate. Plan budgets count usage at the same per-token model rates.
Same model, same work: about the same money
Pinned to one model, neither option is a discount. A dollar of OpenRouter credit buys about $0.95 of inference after the fee. A dollar of a Standard Compute plan buys $1.05 to $1.14 of compute at model rates, but only if you use the whole budget; an unused budget does not roll over, so light months cost less on OpenRouter.
The money moves when cheaper models do the routine steps. On the median day above, the same 94 requests cost $3.53 on Claude Sonnet 5.5 and $0.23 on GPT-6 Luna, about 15 times less. Every file read, search or small edit that an efficient model can handle is a step you stop paying frontier rates for. That is what the Standard Compute router is built to do: harder steps go to stronger models, routine steps go to efficient ones, inside a fixed monthly price.
The catch
OpenRouter's fee is small next to the inference itself; the real cost driver for an agent is that spend is open-ended. Without a key limit, a loop that retries all night bills every token. With a key limit, the agent stops when it is hit, exactly like a plan budget, so the question becomes which model each step runs on.
Where Standard Compute fits
Standard Compute is an OpenAI- and Anthropic-compatible API with a flat monthly plan from $19 that includes a compute budget ($20 to $269 on Individual plans). Its router sends each request to the most cost-efficient model that fits, or you pin any model ID. New requests stop with HTTP 402 when the budget is used, with no overage. Claude Code and Codex connect natively, and company workspaces give every key its own plan.
FAQ
Does OpenRouter charge a markup on tokens?
No. OpenRouter passes through each provider's price without markup. It charges a fee when you buy credits: 5.5% with a $0.80 minimum on the Standard plan, 8% on Business, 5% for crypto, with discounts on Enterprise.
Is BYOK on OpenRouter free?
Up to a point. On Standard and Business the first $25,000 a month of list-price inference through your own provider keys has no fee. Above that, OpenRouter charges 5% of what the same usage would cost on OpenRouter, deducted from your credits.
Do OpenRouter credits expire?
OpenRouter's terms let it expire unused credits one year after purchase. Unused credits are refundable only within 24 hours of purchase, and the platform fee is not refunded.
How much does Claude Code cost on OpenRouter?
It follows your usage at Anthropic's rates plus the 5.5% credit fee. Using our Agent Burn Index, a median coding month (20 active days) is about $74 on Claude Sonnet 5.5 and about $149 on Claude Opus 5.5; a busy month on Sonnet 5.5 is about $611. Claude Code connects natively with ANTHROPIC_BASE_URL set to https://openrouter.ai/api.
Will OpenRouter's fees change after the Stripe deal?
Nothing yet. Stripe announced on August 19, 2026 that it agreed to acquire OpenRouter, and OpenRouter's own post that day said its name, product, roadmap and integrations stay as they are. Neither company has announced that the deal closed, and OpenRouter's fees are the same as before.
Is OpenRouter or a flat plan cheaper for a coding agent?
For the same pinned model and the same work, the cost is close: OpenRouter adds 5.5%, a plan includes 5% to 14% more compute than its price but only pays off if you use the budget. Light or irregular use is cheaper on OpenRouter. A flat plan wins when you want a fixed monthly cost and let the router move routine steps to efficient models.