标签：#openrouter

I run a production multi-agent AI system on a single M1 Mac in Jamaica. 6 autonomous agents. 26 cron workflows. 5-layer persistent memory. All containerized, all running 24/7. I checked my OpenRouter dashboard last week and realized something: I'd processed 2.4 billion tokens across 52 different AI models and spent a total of $0.52 . That's not a typo. Here's exactly where that money went and what it means. The Numbers Metric Value Total Requests 26,600+ Tokens Processed 2.4 Billion Models Used 52 Total Cost $0.52 Cost per Token $0.00000021 Tokens per Dollar 4.6 Million For context: GPT-4 Turbo costs about $0.00001 per token at scale. I'm running at roughly 50x below that rate. Where the $0.52 Actually Went Here's the breakdown by model: Model Requests Tokens Cost openrouter/owl-alpha 1,334 251.2M $0.00 nvidia/nemotron-3-super-120b 32 1.8M $0.00 google/gemma-4-31b-it 47 1.8M $0.00 openai/gpt-5 1 2.8K $0.03 google/gemini-3.1-pro-preview 1 3.2K $0.04 anthropic/claude-opus-4 1 2.0K $0.13 qwen/qwen3.5-plus 1 6.3K $0.01 z-ai/glm-5-turbo 1 3.0K $0.01 moonshotai/kimi-k2.5 2 4.1K $0.01 google/gemini-2.5-flash 2 5.5K $0.01 +42 other models ~125 ~8.5M ~$0.28 99.6% of my requests cost exactly $0.00. They ran on free-tier models or local inference. The $0.52 comes from a handful of premium model calls: Claude Opus, GPT-5, Gemini Pro. These are reserved for specific high-quality tasks — not everyday inference. What This Would Cost on Cloud Approach Hardware Monthly Cost Annual Cost My setup (M1 Mac) M1 Mac 16GB, local + free tier ~$0.09 ~$1.04 OpenRouter Paid Tier API-only, no local $15-30 $180-360 AWS (g4dn.xlarge + API) 1x T4 GPU, on-demand $350-500 $4,200-6,000 AWS (g5.xlarge + API) 1x A10G GPU, on-demand $700-1,000 $8,400-12,000 A $1,200 laptop replaces $500-1,000/month in cloud bills. The break-even point is about 2 weeks. How the Architecture Works The key insight: not every task needs a $20/month model . My system routes tasks intelligently: Local inference (free): Ollama

OpenRouter is a unified API gateway to hundreds of language models from providers such as OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, and Meta. You use one API key and one billing surface, and swap models by changing a provider/model slug. OpenRouter exposes a Chat Completions -compatible HTTP API. This post shows three Node.js integration paths: the official @openrouter/sdk , the openai package with baseURL , and the Vercel AI SDK with @openrouter/ai-sdk-provider . For deeper patterns on each stack, see the Chat Completions API , OpenAI Responses API (OpenAI direct only), and Vercel AI SDK posts. Prerequisites OpenRouter account API key Credits or billing enabled as needed Node.js version 26 Install packages for the path you use: @openrouter/sdk ( npm i @openrouter/sdk ) openai ( npm i openai ) ai and @openrouter/ai-sdk-provider ( npm i ai @openrouter/ai-sdk-provider ) Configuration Read credentials from the environment in production. Variable Purpose OPENROUTER_API_KEY Bearer token from OpenRouter settings OPENROUTER_MODEL Default model slug, for example openai/gpt-5.5 OPENROUTER_SITE_URL Optional site URL sent as HTTP-Referer for rankings on openrouter.ai OPENROUTER_SITE_TITLE Optional app name sent as X-OpenRouter-Title Model IDs use the provider/model format, for example openai/gpt-5.5 , anthropic/claude-opus-4.8 , or google/gemini-3.1-flash-lite . Browse the full catalog at openrouter.ai/models . The examples below use openai/gpt-5.5 , matching the model in the other LLM posts in this series. Override it with OPENROUTER_MODEL when you want a different model. @openrouter/sdk OpenRouter's official TypeScript SDK is type-safe and generated from the OpenAPI spec. Client setup import { OpenRouter } from ' @openrouter/sdk ' ; const client = new OpenRouter ({ apiKey : process . env . OPENROUTER_API_KEY , httpReferer : process . env . OPENROUTER_SITE_URL , appTitle : process . env . OPENROUTER_SITE_TITLE , }); Basic integration const response = await client . chat . send ({ chatReques