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Why not OpenRouter?
It's the first question we get, so here is the direct answer, plus LiteLLM, the observability tools, and doing nothing at all. Including where each of them beats us.
The short version: a credit-based router takes a percentage of the bill you want to shrink. We charge a flat fee and never touch your tokens: your keys, your provider rates, and budgets that block the request instead of emailing you about it.
The markup math
A percentage fee scales with your spend. A flat subscription doesn't. Drag the slider to see where the lines cross for your traffic.
Your monthly LLM spend
$2,250/mo
- 5.5% credit fee, per year
- $1,485
- TokenRouter Starter, per year
- $348
- You keep
- $1,137/yr
Routing fees scale with your spend. A flat subscription doesn't, and the gap only widens as you grow.
Models OpenRouter's 5.5% fee on purchased credits (8% on Business pay-as-you-go). On OpenRouter BYOK, the first $25k/mo of list-price inference carries no fee and 5% applies above that.
Side by side
Four different answers to “one endpoint in front of many models”, built for four different buyers.
Competitor details summarized from public pricing pages and documentation as of October 2026. These products ship fast, so check the vendor for current terms before you decide.
The honest answers
Why not OpenRouter?
OpenRouter resells tokens. Buy credits and 5.5% comes off the top (8% on Business pay-as-you-go), a fixed percentage of a bill you are trying to grow. At $50k/mo of inference on credits that is $2,750/mo, every month, for routing. Bring your own keys and the first $25k/mo of list-price inference carries no fee, with 5% above that, so the same $50k/mo still costs $1,250/mo.
TokenRouter never touches your tokens. You bring your own provider keys, the provider bills you at your rate (including any committed-use or enterprise discount you have negotiated), and you pay us a flat subscription that does not move when your usage does.
The deeper difference is what the two products are for. OpenRouter is built to help a developer reach many models quickly. TokenRouter is built to answer the questions a finance or platform lead asks: which team spent this, on what, and what stops it from happening again next month. Budgets here are enforced before the request leaves the building, not reported after the invoice arrives.
Where they win: Pick OpenRouter if you want one account that reaches hundreds of models, including ones you have no contract for, without setting up provider accounts; if a percentage fee on a small bill is cheaper than a subscription; or if you bring your own keys and stay under their $25k/mo fee-free BYOK tier.
Why not LiteLLM? It's free and open source.
LiteLLM is genuinely good, and if you have a platform team that wants to own a proxy, it is a reasonable choice. The cost is not the license. It is the Postgres, the Redis, the rate-limit correctness under concurrency, the upgrade treadmill as five providers change their APIs, and the pager that rings when the proxy in front of all your AI traffic goes down at 3am.
That is the thing we sell: the same control plane, without you operating the piece every production request depends on. A single engineer-week per month of maintenance costs more than the top plan here.
Where they win: Pick LiteLLM if you need to run inside your own VPC today with no third party in the path, or if you want to fork the routing logic.
Why not Helicone, Portkey, LangSmith or Braintrust?
Those are observability and evaluation products. They are excellent at showing you what your prompts did, because they store your prompts. That is the product. They tell you that a team spent $40k last month.
TokenRouter is a control plane. It stops the team at $30k. Different job, and the two coexist: nothing here prevents you sending traces to an eval tool.
It also means the security review is a different conversation. Request logs here carry token counts, cost and latency. No prompt bodies, no completions, unless you explicitly opt a key, team, or member into capture. The prompt-retention question has a one-line answer: nothing is retained that you didn't turn on, and what you turn on is encrypted, retention-capped, and deletable in one click.
Where they win: Pick an eval platform when the problem you have is prompt quality and regression testing, not spend and access control. Many teams run both.
Why not just call the providers directly?
Most teams start there, and it works right up until the third team wants a key. Then keys get shared, spend is attributed by asking people, one runaway agent loop produces a five-figure surprise, and swapping a model means a deploy in every service that hardcoded it.
One base URL swap gets you per-team keys with hard caps, a model allowlist, per-model spend attribution, and the ability to change which model a team uses without shipping code.
Where they win: Stay direct if you have one team, one provider, and a spend number you would not mind seeing double.
Keep the routing. Drop the routing fee.
Point your OpenAI or Anthropic SDK at TokenRouter, bring your own keys, and set budgets that actually enforce themselves. The free plan needs no card.