T
TOpenRouter vs Replicate
Pricing, features, platforms and who each one suits — side by side.
O
Choose OpenRouter if…
- you want a free plan to start with
- you're in its core audience: software developers, ai app and agent builders
R
Choose Replicate if…
- you're in its core audience: software developers, ml engineers
Side by side
Feature OpenRouter Replicate
Pricing modelFreemiumPaid
Starting price——
Free plan
Free trial
API
Open source
Data retention—Retained as long as necessary to provide Services; backups kept limited period
PlatformsWeb, APIWeb, API
CategoryLLM APIs & Model HostingDeveloper Tools & APIs
CompanyOpenRouterReplicate · part of Cloudflare
Full feature lists
O OpenRouter
- OpenAI-compatible chat completions endpoint
- Access to 600+ models from 80+ providers
- Automatic fallbacks around provider outages and rate limits
- Image, video, text-to-speech and speech-to-text endpoints
- Bring your own provider keys
- Budgets, spend controls and activity log export
- EU and US in-region routing
- Hosted MCP server for agent tooling
R Replicate
- Thousands of public models for image, video, audio and text
- Python, JavaScript and HTTP API clients
- Fine-tune models such as SDXL on your own data
- Deploy custom models packaged with open-source Cog
- Autoscaling that scales to zero when idle
- Per-second billing across CPU and Nvidia GPUs
- Logging and monitoring of predictions
Their home pages
What each vendor shows first: the pitch, the plans and the sign-up.
OpenRouter · openrouter.ai
Replicate · replicate.comWhat you'd pay
The cheapest plan that fits, per month, billed yearly where the plan offers it.
OpenRouter
FreeFree
Standard5.5% fee on credit purchases
Business8% fee on credit purchases
EnterpriseCustom
Replicate
Pay-as-you-go (hardware)From $0.000025/sec (CPU Small, $0.09/hr); Nvidia T4 $0.81/hr; H100 $5.49/hr
Pay-as-you-go (per-model)e.g. flux-dev $0.025/image, flux-1.1-pro $0.04/image
EnterpriseCustom
Price changes we've recorded
We re-read each pricing page every month and log what changed.
OpenRouter
- Nov 8, 2026Standard: Pay-as-you-go, 5.5% fee on credit purchases → 5.5% fee on credit purchases; Business: Pay-as-you-go, 8% fee on credit purchases → 8% fee on credit purchases
Replicate
No changes since we started tracking.
Strengths and limitations
OpenRouter
- No markup on provider token prices
- Free plan with 25+ free models
- BYOK fee-free up to $25,000 of monthly inference
- Payment by card, AliPay or USDC
- 5.5–8% platform fee on credit purchases
- Free plan limited to 50 requests per day
- SSO/SAML and SLAs only on Enterprise
Replicate
- Pay only for the compute time or outputs you use
- Wide range of hardware, from CPU to 8x H100
- Cog packaging tool is open source
- Model pages show cost estimates
- No free plan listed on the pricing page
- Private models are billed for idle and setup time
- Larger multi-GPU capacity requires committed spend contracts
More comparisons
Other options to consider
TT
Paid
T
Cloud for running, fine-tuning and scaling open-source AI models on GPUs
LLM APIs & Model HostingAPI
F
FInference and fine-tuning platform for open AI models, for developers and teams
From $8/mo
F
From $8/mo
F
Inference and fine-tuning platform for open AI models, for developers and teams
LLM APIs & Model HostingAPI
G
GG
Freemium
G
Fast LLM inference cloud and OpenAI-compatible API built on custom LPU chips
LLM APIs & Model HostingFree planAPI
D
DD
Freemium
M
MOpen-weight AI models, chat and coding agent you can run on your own infrastructure
Free, from $14.99/mo
M
Free, from $14.99/mo
M
Open-weight AI models, chat and coding agent you can run on your own infrastructure
Local & Open ModelsFree planAPIOpen source
O
OO
Free, from $16.67/mo
O
Run open AI models locally or in the cloud on macOS, Windows and Linux
Local & Open ModelsFree planAPIOpen source
Facts from each vendor's public pages, prices checked Oct 26, 2026. Editorial policy