An OpenRouter alternative that runs on your own subscriptions

OpenRouter and Plan2API side by side

OpenRouter sells tokens from 500+ models across 80+ providers using prepaid credits or your own provider API keys. Plan2API runs the models in your own Claude Pro or Max, ChatGPT (Codex), Google AI Pro or Ultra and Kimi plans behind one OpenAI-compatible key.

What OpenRouter costs in 2026

OpenRouter bills inference at each provider's own list price with no markup on the tokens themselves, so anthropic/claude-opus-5.5 runs $4 per 1M input tokens and $20 per 1M output tokens, the exact same rate as Anthropic's API, while google/gemini-4-argon and openai/gpt-6.1-sol both sit at $2 in and $10 out. Instead of marking up tokens, OpenRouter charges its platform fee upfront when you buy credits: 5.5% on the Standard plan and 8% on Business, which means adding $100 of credits to your balance costs $105.50 on Standard or $108 on Business.

If you bring your own provider API keys (BYOK) on a Standard or Business plan, OpenRouter gives you $25,000 of list-price inference a month with no fee, and then deducts 5% of what those requests would cost on OpenRouter from your credit balance once you pass that mark. OpenRouter's free models with ids ending in :free are capped at 20 requests a minute and 50 requests a day, or 1,000 a day after your account has bought at least $10 of credits, and failed attempts count against that daily limit.

OpenRouter's platform fees are non-refundable, though unused credits not bought with crypto can be refunded within 24 hours of purchase.

When your subscriptions are the cheaper route

• You already pay every month for Claude Pro or Max, ChatGPT Plus or Pro, Google AI Pro or Ultra, or a Kimi membership, and you're still buying OpenRouter credits on top to run the same providers' models in your code or editor.
• You run heavy daily workloads where per-token billing stacks up fast: 1M input tokens and 200K output tokens a day on anthropic/claude-opus-5.5 comes out to $8 a day or $240 per 30 days at list price, and $253.20 when bought as OpenRouter Standard credits with the 5.5% fee, compared with a flat $100 or $200 a month for Claude Max (see the Claude API vs subscription breakdown).
• You want a single p2a_ API key across all 4 providers and automatic failover that shifts a request to the next connected account of the same provider before any output is sent whenever one account hits its quota.
• You'd rather hit a plan's usage limit than pay for every token; when every connected account is out of quota, Plan2API returns HTTP 429 (subscription_quota_exhausted) with a Retry-After header.

Anthropic, OpenAI and Google don't publish their plan limits as fixed token counts, so sustained heavy traffic can still run into them.

When OpenRouter is the better pick

• You need access to the rest of OpenRouter's 500+ models from 80+ providers, or specific models from these four providers that Plan2API doesn't serve, such as anthropic/claude-sonnet-5.5, anthropic/claude-haiku-5.5 or moonshotai/kimi-k3.1-pro.
• You don't already pay for a monthly AI plan and your usage is light enough that paying per token plus the 5.5% OpenRouter fee comes out under the cost of a subscription.
• You're building a product or app that serves other people, since Anthropic's Claude Code legal page states that third-party developers may not route requests through Free, Pro, or Max plan credentials on behalf of their users.
• Your code needs embeddings, OpenAI's Responses API or the legacy /completions endpoint, which OpenRouter offers and Plan2API doesn't.
• You want provider routing and fallbacks across dozens of inference hosts, or you need the EU and US in-region routing and up to 1,000 workspaces on OpenRouter Business.

Switching from OpenRouter takes two lines

Sign in with a Google account at plan2api.com/connect, connect your subscriptions (signing in with your Claude, ChatGPT or Google account, or pasting a Kimi Code API key) to get a p2a_ key, and swap your base URL to https://api.plan2api.com/v1 with your key in the Authorization: Bearer header. OpenRouter model ids carry over for the models Plan2API serves, including anthropic/claude-opus-5.5, openai/gpt-6.1-sol (when your ChatGPT plan includes it) and moonshotai/kimi-k3, while Gemini models use Plan2API ids like gemini/gemini-4-argon-high (the google/ prefix works too). OpenRouter-style reasoning.effort settings and reasoning_effort both work, along with streaming and tool calling as covered in the API documentation.

Here is how the base URL and key change looks in Python with the standard OpenAI SDK:

from openai import OpenAI

client = OpenAI(
    base_url="https://api.plan2api.com/v1",  # was https://openrouter.ai/api/v1
    api_key="p2a_...",                       # your Plan2API key
)

response = client.chat.completions.create(
    model="anthropic/claude-opus-5.5",
    messages=[{"role": "user", "content": "Summarize this changelog in 3 bullets."}],
    extra_body={"reasoning": {"effort": "high"}},
)

print(response.choices[0].message.content)

Other OpenRouter alternatives

Most other OpenRouter alternatives are gateways for pay-per-token models, billed through your own provider keys or the gateway's credits, while CLIProxyAPI is the self-hosted way to put an API in front of your subscriptions.

For a deeper look at how the pay-per-token routers stack up, see our LLM gateway comparison, or check out the full list of tools that turn a subscription into an API if you want to compare self-hosted proxies with hosted options.