Home → Compare → APICLAN vs OpenRouter
Both put many models behind one OpenAI-compatible endpoint. They make money in completely different places, which is the only thing that matters when you are choosing between them.
OpenRouter does not mark up inference. Their own documentation says they “pass through the pricing of the underlying providers without any markup, so you pay the same rate as you would directly with the provider.” They charge 5.5% (minimum $0.80) on card top-ups and 5% on crypto, and for bring-your-own-key traffic they charge 5% above a monthly allowance. (Terms as published on openrouter.ai/docs/faq, checked 2026-09-07.)
APICLAN sells below list. Every model here is published at a fixed fraction of the provider's official rate — the fraction is printed on each model's page and it is the same number your invoice uses.
So this is not a comparison of who takes a smaller cut of the same price. The prices themselves are different.
| Per 1M tokens | Provider list | Via OpenRouter | Here |
|---|---|---|---|
gpt-6-astra | $10.00 / $50.00 | $10.55 / $52.75 | $2.00 / $10.00 |
gpt-5.6-sol | $5.00 / $30.00 | $5.27 / $31.65 | $1.00 / $6.00 |
claude-opus-5 | $5.00 / $25.00 | $5.27 / $26.38 | $1.50 / $7.50 |
claude-sonnet-5 | $2.00 / $10.00 | $2.11 / $10.55 | $0.600 / $3.00 |
grok-4.6 | $2.00 / $6.00 | $2.11 / $6.33 | $0.550 / $1.65 |
The OpenRouter column is list price plus the 5.5% card top-up fee, since that is what leaves your bank account to buy the credits. If you fund with crypto the fee is 5%. Their per-token rate itself is the provider's own.
Take a coding agent doing 3,000 calls a month on claude-sonnet-5. From our
own logs the median call on that model costs 0.0087 credits, and the mean is 0.0255 —
the spread is prompt caching, not noise.
At our published rate that month lands between roughly $13 and $38. The same traffic at provider list, funded through a 5.5% top-up, lands near $44 to $128. The gap is not a percentage shaved off a fee; it is the price of the tokens.
Several situations, and they are not edge cases:
Fewer models. Keys are bound to one group, so a key made for text models cannot call image models — that trips up new users regularly. Payment is USDT only. And the capacity behind these prices is purchased differently from a metered API account, which is exactly why the prices are lower and also why we do not promise the same availability guarantees a provider does.
If per-token cost is the thing driving your decision, the numbers above are the whole argument. If any line in the previous section applies to you, it should outweigh them.
Every price we quote has its own page with the list price beside it, a calculator, and a worked example from real billing data — start at the price list. OpenRouter's fee terms are on their own FAQ page. Neither of us should be taken at our word for the other's numbers.
No subscription, no monthly minimum, no sales call. Top up with USDT and spend what you use — 1 USDT gives you 2 credits of API balance.
Read the 30-second quickstartCompetitor terms quoted from their own published documentation and checked on 2026-09-07. Our prices are regenerated automatically from live billing data.