Openrouter Reviews 33

No free LLM is available, although a variety of models is listed. When trying a request, you will get a response like "LLM is temporarily rate-limited upstream. Please retry shortly, or add your own key to accumulate your rate limits."

Absolute Trash

I started using open router because I needed a fast and easy LLM API to use for the app I built as well as my coding assistant. Little did I know that this would be one of the biggest mistakes I've made in recent years.

Not only did they start rate limiting me like crazy, but the rate limits don't reset like you'd expect them to. The greedy company expect you to pay money to use free models, which as the name implies are supposed to be free. Otherwise they will make your API useless and you will continuously get a 429 error and no LLM response.

I do not suggest ANYONE USE THIS GARBAGE SITE.
Since they want to be greedy, I suggest we all just unanimously boycott them so they go out of business. You screw us, we screw you back.

I HAVE A PROBLEM WHERE THEY KEEP ON CHANGING THE OPENROUTER ID MODEL NAMES, SO ANYTIME A USER TRIES TO PROMPT AI IT RETURNS AN ERROR, AND MY LOGS TELL ME THAT THAT IS AN INVALID ID MODEL. CAN THE ID model IDs just be standard, please

Account got hacked. Email was changed without sending a verfication code E-Mail, before they changed the email to the hackers email. They just said "this wasnt you? contact support." Contacted support two times no response in an urgent matter... credit card information stored by them was used multiple times by the unauthorized party!!! Dont hope that support will help you, immediately go to your bank and lock your credit card... They wont help you... Take your business elsewhere They are not serious about holding good customer relations!!!

Awful customer service.
I want to setup vat free billing for my business but I'm just getting copy past responses from someone who can't speak English.

I was very interested in using OpenRouter, but the experience has been extremely disappointing from the start.

OpenRouter is blocking my company email address during registration, with no clear explanation. As a result, I was forced to create an account using a random Gmail address just to access the service.

This is not acceptable for a platform that claims to be serious and developer-friendly. A business service should allow users to register with legitimate company domains. Blocking them without transparency feels arbitrary and discriminatory, and it immediately damages trust.

I’m honestly surprised this is how they handle onboarding, especially for customers who want to use the platform professionally.

Terrible customer service and slow replies. I accidentally loaded my personal account with credits and contacted the company within 13 minutes (well within their 24 hour limit). Still getting no responses, avoid like the plague.

I lost all my credits and no one can tell me why. I can't even void this operation through my credit card, because they waited until they received their money before robbing me.

They have awful compromises account support, instead assuming everything is the customers fault. If someone spends money from my card on my account, that’s not an issue with an API key.

It's transparent, it lets you try out all these different LLMs with little investment. I've spent so little since April and I feel like I'm doing a lot. I've spent less than a single month of premium of any of the direct provider subscriptions. The only thing I can't do is to copy or download an entire chat. You have to copy each portion of the conversations at a time. Question / answer / question / answer. It'd be great if I could just click copy at the end of a long chat and get all the answers and responses at once. It's my only complaint.

Overall the idea of OpenRouter is great but it's also an extreme risk to lose your entire Budget within minutes for no gain.

I've been using it on Vscode using the #1 extension for coding: Github Copilot
Normally costs of 0.01 to 1.5 USD cents per call occur when using a "premium" model like Codex 5 or GPT5.
However when using Sonet 4.5, which is supposed to be slightly more expensive (about 1.5x) the cost are 100 times higher.
So instead of paying 1 cent per internal tool call, Openrouter bills 1.5 USD.
And one single question to the agentic system causes dozens of calls.

I received less than 100 lines of output, those I had to throw away because they were useless and I paid almost 50 USD for that.

50 USD using Codex 5 or normal Copilot Premium costs would carry me 2 months of intense use.

So this is my frustrating resumee of OpenRouter and a bold warning.

No support!

Unfortunately, the customer support team is not answering any questions whatsoever.

If I spend my money somewhere, I at least expect some kind of customer support, and not just silence.

This is a scam.

I have no relationship with this company, yet they have started charging my bank account.

I have already contacted the support team several times and even written to them on LinkedIn.

They completely ignore my inquiry.
Even if they might not be the ones engaging in illegal activities, they certainly don't care about illegal and fraudulent action within their payment system and on their platform.

Don't use it if you don't engage in illegal activities.

We've been using openrouter for a while and here's my 2cents: it's worth it for discovery, til you find your best models, then you can skip it and go directly with providers because it has a price markup, rate limits and unexplainable downservices. We got better control on what's happening by going directly with providers.

People are complaining about OpenRouter not offering excellent service for free - it's a business, people! And OpenRouter doesn't even have anything to do with any rate limits, considering it's simply an aggregator of providers!

The owners seem to be getting lazier with their service however. The website's performance is dropping rapidly, and editing of messages becomes nigh impossible the longer they are. It's been years, people! You should have a regular kind of customer support rather than a Discord channel of all places. Good selection of models and versatile API, but the service is far from good as of 2025.

Three stars.

Review updated 24/11/2025

I start with the free models, and i don't remember used it more than 5 request with a normal response back from the model, and they count about 500 requests which i was shocked how they calculate the API requests, i was hesitant to add credits to increase my daily limits for using free models as it's useless when you calculate it this way.

These "OpenRouter" staff need to actually care about people using free options of their models, because im so tired of seeing that for whatever reason, my API just keeps getting rate-limited and I could only get like 6 responses using free version. Include the fact it still takes a request from you daily balance wich is just great. Shame on yall.

The first time I tried it was nice but after some time it broke. All credits gone just because the models kept breaking. A waste of money to be honest and if you're new to this just use the free credits but know that even whit 50 of them the best you'll get is just one response and the rest just error 429. I hope they fix it even though my hopes are not high.

It's good and bad at the same time. The models are okay but lots of them break, or get errors 429. So my honest opinion would be that it's good, but eats credits whit no response in return. I hope that they will fix it