Best AI API Aggregators in 2026: OpenRouter and 20 Alternatives Compared Side by Side
11 min read · Published · Updated
APIMODELS, our own product, and 20 other AI API aggregators side by side: prices against the makers' list prices, fees, free use, models, MCP and Agent Skills, and who runs them. Most bill list prices plus a 4.6% to 5.5% top-up fee; the few below list price do not say where the access comes from.
Disclosure
APIMODELS is our own product: it is made by the team behind GenGrades, and GenGrades' content backend runs on hub.apimodels.app. We put it first because it sells most of the models compared here below the makers' list prices under one key, with an official MCP server and Agent Skills. Its column and its full review are built the same way as the other 20, from its public pages, and they include the problems we found on those pages.
Side by side
Every pick in its own column, compared on the same rows: price, fees, free use, models, MCP, Skills and more.
Per million input / output tokens on October 21, 2026; GPT-6 Sol and Gemini 4 Argon at 2/10 USD, the makers' prices. No markup with your own keys either.
Per million input / output tokens; GPT-5.4 2.50 / 15 USD, as at OpenAI. Its list showed Sonnet 5.5 cache reads at 0.20 USD, double Anthropic's 0.10 USD.
List price or below; e.g. DeepSeek V4 Pro 1.32/3.96 USD
Per million input / output tokens: DeepSeek's peak price at all hours (DeepSeek: 0.66 / 1.98 off-peak). Kimi K2.6 0.80 / 3.40 vs Moonshot's 0.95 / 4.00.
Remote server at mcp.openrouter.ai/mcp: search models, prices and docs, read credits, send test messages; OAuth keys expire after 7 days with a 10 USD cap.
MCP Gateway at router.requesty.ai/v1/mcp proxies servers your admins register, with tool allow-lists; no Requesty MCP server for its own docs or account.
Hosted at mcp.edenai.run/mcp, exposing expert models as tools (ocr, web_search, image_generation, translation); each tool call is billed as a normal call.
Local stdio server: models, quota, usage, aliases and keys; write and deploy tools in beta. Setups for Cursor, Cline, Aider, Hermes and Claude Desktop.
Remote at mcp.aimlapi.com/mcp with OAuth or API key: model search, inference, long jobs, balance and its Toolbox web tools; calls billed like the REST API.
OpenRouterTeam/skills covers its SDKs, analytics, models, images, video, speech and OAuth; installable as a Claude Code plugin or with gh skill install.
The cloudflare skill covers configuration, SDK integration, billing and dynamic routing; installs as a plugin for Claude Code, Codex, Cursor and VS Code.
requestyai/skills, created April 30, 2026: API, routing policies, guardrails, MCP gateway, model discovery, and Claude Code and OpenCode usage analytics.
Logging can be turned off per gateway; zero data retention covers only Unified Billing on Cloudflare's credentials and does not change gateway logging.
The terms name Boiler Labs FZ-LLC, Ras Al Khaimah, as the contracting party and put disputes under Estonian law; the footer also lists AIMLAPI OÜ, Tallinn.
Moonshot AI: 83.05-96.46% tool-call accuracy by host
K2 Vendor Verifier, November 2025: Kimi K2-thinking through OpenRouter's hosts scored 83.05% (Chutes) to 96.46% (NovitaAI), against 100% on Moonshot's API.
Median time to first token on Claude Haiku 4.5 from Northern Virginia, October 16, 2026, on the passthrough route with a provider key; every request succeeded.
Above that the gateway returns 429 on Cloudflare's credentials; the cap does not apply to your own keys. Free accounts can create 10 gateways, paid 20.
Trustpilot reviewers report failing tool calls and timeouts (August 2026), a slow API (September 2026) and paying for failed tool calls (October 2026).
What each one is, who it suits, and the full review.
1. APIMODELS
Indie developers testing image and video models on a 10 USD top-upOur product
APIMODELS, made by the team behind GenGrades, resells about 158 chat, image, video and audio models through one key in OpenAI, Anthropic and Gemini formats at its own prices, 10% to about 90% below the makers' list on the models compared, such as Claude Opus 5.5 at 2.40 / 12 USD against 4 / 20. Its terms name PIXLUME LLC but no address or governing law, it has no status page, and it names no reseller agreement with the makers.
Developers trying many models from one key and one bill
OpenRouter, Inc. of New York sells one API key and one prepaid balance for 686 model IDs from 113 hosting providers, at each provider's list price plus 5.5% on credit purchases. Per request you can pin hosts, sort by price or require zero data retention. Public tests show the same open-weight model scoring differently by host, and Stripe's agreed purchase had not closed by October 21, 2026.
Teams on Vercel or the AI SDK who want list prices and no relay fee
Vercel AI Gateway is Vercel's hosted API for 482 text, image, video and speech models behind one key and one prepaid credit balance. It charges the makers' list prices with no token markup, also with your own keys, and gives each team 5 USD of free credit a month. The caveat is billing: forum users report paid credits blocked for days, and BYOK requests fail at a 0 USD balance.
Cloudflare teams wanting free logs and limits on their own keys
Cloudflare AI Gateway is a free proxy that adds logging, caching, rate limits and fallbacks in front of 24 providers using your own keys. Its Unified Billing credits, launched in August 2025, call OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, xAI and Groq models without your own keys at list price plus a 5% fee on each purchase. Requests on those credits are capped at 200 a minute per gateway, and prompts are logged by default.
Developers adding image, video or audio from 1,000+ models
fal, run by Features & Labels, Inc. of San Francisco, sells per-output access to more than 1,000 image, video, audio and 3D models on one prepaid balance through its own queue API, with an official hosted MCP server. Open-weight models such as FLUX are cheap, but Google's partner models cost more than on Google's API, it serves no chat models, and purchased credits expire after a year.
Teams running open models or deploying their own with Cog
Replicate, a Cloudflare subsidiary since December 2025, runs 100+ official models such as Veo 3.1 and Nano Banana Pro per output and 50,000+ community models per second of GPU time, and lets you deploy your own with Cog. It was fast on many open models in Artificial Analysis' medians, but Google's models cost more than on Google's API, Kling 3.0 costs double fal's price, and support complaints go unanswered.
Teams wanting spend caps, fallbacks and an EU endpoint
Requesty Ltd of London runs an LLM gateway with OpenAI- and Anthropic-compatible endpoints for what it calls 600+ models, at the makers' list prices plus 5% on every top-up. It sells control rather than catalog size: dashboard fallback chains, spend limits per key or user, guardrails and an EU endpoint in Frankfurt. Prompts are logged by default on self-serve plans, and no independent test has been published.
EU teams needing LLMs plus OCR, speech and translation
Eden AI SAS of Lyon, France, puts about 500 language models and 250 expert models for OCR, speech, translation and image work behind one key and one prepaid balance. It passes the makers' list prices through and has added a 5.5% platform fee on self-serve credits since January 2026; an EU-only endpoint refuses non-EU models. Payments are non-refundable unless otherwise stated, and no third-party benchmark has been published.
Private, small or crypto payments and budget roleplay chat
NanoGPT LLC, a U.S. company, runs a pay-per-prompt web chat and an OpenAI- and Anthropic-compatible API for 668 models at the makers' list prices, with no deposit fee. Deposits start at 0.10 USD in crypto with no account, and a 12 USD monthly plan covers open-weight models but not Claude or GPT. Open-weight models run on many third-party hosts, and Trustpilot reviewers report failing tool calls in agent work.
Kilo Code users bringing their own keys or a coding plan
Kilo Gateway is the OpenAI-compatible model API behind the Kilo Code agent, run by Kilo Code, Inc., which Anaconda acquired in July 2026. Tokens cost the upstream rate plus a 5% fee on each credit purchase, while your own keys and coding plans route at no Kilo charge. It is largely a layer on OpenRouter: 388 of its 400 model IDs also appear there, and only Chat Completions is documented.
OpenCode users wanting coding models paid by Alipay or WeChat
OpenCode Zen, called OpenCode Console in the docs since October 2026, is the pay-as-you-go gateway from Anomaly Innovations, maker of the OpenCode coding agent. It sells about 80 text and code models near the makers' list prices plus a 4.6% + 0.31 USD card fee, in OpenAI, Anthropic and Gemini formats. On October 17, 2026 it disclosed a Console breach that may have exposed provider keys saved by 1.4% of users.
Zero-retention access to new open models (DeepSeek, GLM, Kimi, Qwen)
Novita AI hosts 96 open-weight chat models such as DeepSeek, GLM, Kimi and Qwen, plus image, video, GPU and sandbox services, behind OpenAI- and Anthropic-compatible endpoints; it does not sell GPT, Claude or Gemini. Its terms promise zero data retention by default and its per-token prices match or undercut the makers', but it names no company or address and its fees are non-refundable.
Video buyers paying by Alipay, WeChat Pay or PayPal
WaveSpeedAI, whose terms name a Singapore and a Hong Kong company, sells 1,000+ image, video, audio and 3D models plus an LLM service in OpenAI and Anthropic formats on one balance that never expires, paid by card, PayPal, Alipay or WeChat Pay. It ties fal on Kling 3.0 but was the slowest of three hosts on most shared image models, and its terms cap liability at 100 USD.
Coders wanting one key for Claude, GPT and Chinese models
ZenMux is an LLM gateway whose terms name NexaMind Singapore Pte. Ltd. as operator. It sells 206 models, weighted toward Chinese makers next to Claude, GPT and Gemini, through OpenAI, Anthropic and Vertex-style endpoints at the makers' list prices, plus 20 to 200 USD monthly coding plans and "insurance" credits for bad or slow answers. Claude routes failed twice in 2026, and no page states who owns the operator.
Poe subscribers spending unused points in Claude Code or Cline
Poe API is Quora's developer API for the bots in its Poe chat app, opened on July 31, 2025, with OpenAI-compatible endpoints and an Anthropic-compatible one for official Claude bots. Calls spend the points of a Poe subscription instead of a separate API bill, and current Claude bots cost about 1% more than Anthropic's list. Points are non-refundable, allowances have shrunk at unchanged prices, and bot developers may keep chats.
Voice and consumer apps wanting per-user model routing at list price
Inworld Router is Inworld AI's routing API, which sends OpenAI- and Anthropic-style requests to third-party models at the providers' list prices with no markup and can route or A/B test models by user metadata. On October 14, 2026 Inworld folded it into Inworld Inference, and its listed catalog fell from 220+ models to 129. No third-party benchmark or user review of the router has been published.
Media apps wanting Seedance, Kling and Veo next to Claude and GPT
Atlas Cloud, run by ATLAS CLOUD AI INC. of New York, sells one key and one prepaid balance for Claude, GPT, Gemini, open models it hosts, and media models such as Seedance, Kling and Veo. It charges Anthropic's list prices for Claude and takes Alipay, WeChat Pay and crypto. Top-ups are non-refundable, its compliance claims contradict each other, and its terms bar publishing benchmarks without consent.
Cheap image, video and music experiments with no confidential data
Kie.ai, run by two Denver LLCs, sells credits for other companies' video, image, music and chat models at prices well below the makers' own, such as Veo 3.1 Quality at 1.275 USD per 1080p clip against Google's 3.20, with Anthropic- and OpenAI-format endpoints for coding agents. It does not say how it gets access to those models, has no status page, and its privacy policy says nothing about prompts.
Hobby and roleplay users wanting cheap open models on a flat plan
Chutes is a decentralized inference network on Bittensor subnet 64, run by Chutes Global Corp under Nevis law, where anonymous GPU operators serve 14 open-weight models in trusted execution environments through an OpenAI-compatible API. It charges about half Moonshot's price for Kimi K2.6, but has had no free tier since March 15, 2026, busy models fail with no fallback host, and its prices rest on shrinking TAO subsidies.
Trying many video, image and audio models from one key
AI/ML API sells one prepaid key for text, image, video, voice, music and 3D models, claiming 1000+, with an official remote MCP server and a CLI that sets up coding agents in one command. Its prices for current OpenAI, Anthropic and Google models run about 1.3 times the makers' list prices, the free tier is paused, and the terms rule out refunds. The terms name Boiler Labs FZ-LLC (UAE); the footer also lists AIMLAPI OÜ (Estonia).
Personal projects that want Claude or GPT below list price
CometAPI sells one prepaid key for 322 text, image, video and audio models, Midjourney included, at what its pricing page states is 0.8 times the makers' list prices. It accepts OpenAI, Anthropic and Gemini request formats, with guides for Claude Code, Codex and Gemini CLI. Its terms and privacy pages name no company and use Hong Kong law, and its own status page showed several Claude and GPT models below 98% availability over 24 hours.
Cloudflare completed its acquisition of Replicate on December 1, 2025, for 57.4 million USD in total consideration, according to its 2025 annual report.
If you call one maker's models at volume, its own API is usually cheaper. A relay pays off when you switch between makers, want one bill, or need fallbacks.
2
Compare against the maker's list price
Read the relay's price for the exact model next to the maker's own page, then add the top-up fee. The table's first two rows do this for every service.
3
Read who runs it and the terms
Look for a named company, refund and account-suspension terms, logging and data retention. Several services in the table name no company at all.
4
Pin the host for open models
The same open model can behave differently on different hosts. Where the relay lets you choose the provider, pin the one that works for your prompts.
5
Start small and cap spending
Top up the minimum, set a spend limit on each key, and run your own requests before you move production traffic.
This collection puts 21 AI API aggregators, also called API relays or LLM gateways, in one table: one column per service, the same rows for all of them, and a link from every column to its full review. Every cell was read on the service's own pages or in a named public test on October 21, 2026, and carries its link and date. APIMODELS is our own product, as the note at the top says.
How the list is ordered
APIMODELS comes first because it is ours and because it sells most of the models compared here below the makers' list prices under one key. After it come the relays that pass the makers' list prices through under a named company with published terms, broadest first: OpenRouter, then the two cloud gateways from Vercel and Cloudflare, then the two largest image and video platforms, fal and Replicate. Next are the smaller general relays, the coding-agent gateways and the open-model hosts. Last are the services that sell below list price without saying where the access comes from, or whose own data shows the weakest record: kie.ai, Chutes, AIMLAPI and CometAPI.
There is no score in this list. The order is an editorial reading of the same evidence shown in the table, and each review page shows all of it.
What a relay actually saves you
Most of these services do not make models cheaper. OpenRouter, Vercel, Cloudflare, Requesty, Eden AI, NanoGPT, Kilo Gateway, ZenMux and Inworld all bill the makers' list prices. They earn their money on top:
Service
Fee on top of list price
OpenRouter
5.5% on credit purchases (8% on Business)
Eden AI
5.5% platform fee
Requesty, Cloudflare, Kilo Gateway
5% on each top-up
ZenMux
5% top-up fee, waived for now
OpenCode Zen
4.6% plus 0.31 USD per top-up
Vercel AI Gateway, NanoGPT, Inworld
No top-up fee
What you buy is one key, one bill and the ability to switch models by changing one string, plus routing, fallbacks and spend limits. If you call one maker's models at volume, that maker's own API is usually cheaper.
The ones below list price
A handful sell below the makers' prices. APIMODELS lists Claude Opus 5.5 at 2.40 / 12 USD per million input and output tokens against Anthropic's 4 / 20 USD. Kie.ai lists the same model at 1.60 / 8 USD and Veo 3.1 at 1080p at 1.275 USD against Google's 3.20 USD. CometAPI says its official-model prices are 20% under the makers'. None of the three says how it obtains access at those prices, and APIMODELS' own pages contradict themselves on discounts and channels; its review lists every case. AIMLAPI goes the other way: about 30% above list price.
Lower prices are real money, but they come with a question you should be able to answer before you depend on them: what happens to your workload if that access stops.
What public tests show
Independent tests of relays are few, and they measure different things.
Routing quality. Moonshot's K2 Vendor Verifier sent 4,000 requests to each host of its Kimi K2-thinking model. Through OpenRouter, eight third-party hosts scored 83.05% to 96.46% on tool-call schema accuracy, against 100% on Moonshot's own API; Chutes was last. The same model name does not guarantee the same behaviour.
Gateway latency. ComputeSDK's open benchmark (October 16, 2026, US East) measured Vercel AI Gateway adding roughly 40 to 95 ms to time-to-first-token over calling the provider directly, and Cloudflare 110 to 170 ms. Edgee, a competing gateway, measured Cloudflare lowest of six across 43 regions. Location matters.
Media speed. Artificial Analysis' provider data shows fal fastest on MiniMax H3 video (12.5 s against about 124 s at WaveSpeedAI), Replicate fastest on several open image models, and WaveSpeedAI slowest on most shared image models despite its "sub-second" marketing.
Self-reported uptime. CometAPI's own status page showed 93.9% availability for Claude Opus 5 over 24 hours.
What users report
Trustpilot scores are low across the board: OpenRouter 1.6 out of 5 from 67 reviews, Replicate 1.8 from 16, Poe 1.9 from 63, Kie.ai 2.1 from 16 and fal 2.4 from 32. The complaints repeat: credits that did not arrive, charges for failed jobs, refused refunds, banned accounts and slow support. Most services in the table say payments are non-refundable or that credits expire after a year.
MCP and Agent Skills
The MCP and Agent Skills rows separate three cases: an official MCP server that can call models (OpenRouter, APIMODELS, AI/ML API, Eden AI, NanoGPT, Inworld, Atlas Cloud, fal, Replicate, WaveSpeedAI), an MCP server that only manages your account, platform or GPUs (Vercel, Cloudflare, Kilo, OpenCode, Chutes, Novita), and none at all (ZenMux, Poe, Kie.ai, CometAPI). Official Agent Skills repositories are newer; OpenRouter's has 18 skills and ZenMux's 8. Each review page says what its server's tools do.
Paying from China
OpenRouter, APIMODELS and ZenMux take Alipay; OpenCode Zen, WaveSpeedAI and Atlas Cloud take both Alipay and WeChat Pay. Payment is not the same as access: Anthropic and OpenAI do not list mainland China among their supported regions, and OpenRouter users report region blocks applied at account level.
Who should skip a relay
Skip a relay if you send confidential data and need a named contracting company, a data processing agreement and zero data retention in writing; if you call a single maker at high volume; or if your product cannot survive the relay losing access to a model overnight. Go to the maker's API, or to a cloud gateway such as Vercel's or Cloudflare's that lets you bring your own keys.
Where these tools fall short
What they still get wrong, with the evidence, and what no public test has settled yet.
Weak
Weak
Most relays are not cheaper than going direct.
Evidence: Nine of the 21 bill the makers' list prices and add a 4.6% to 5.5% top-up fee or none; AIMLAPI adds about 30%.
Below-list prices come without an explanation.
Evidence: APIMODELS, Kie.ai and CometAPI sell some models well under the makers' list prices and do not say how they obtain the access.
The same model can behave differently by host.
Evidence: Moonshot's K2 Vendor Verifier measured 83.05% to 96.46% tool-call schema accuracy across third-party hosts reached through OpenRouter, against 100% on Moonshot's API.
Refunds are rare.
Evidence: AIMLAPI, Eden AI, Atlas Cloud, Inworld, Poe and Replicate state that payments or credits are non-refundable, and several let credits expire after 12 months.
Uncertain
Uncertain
Uptime and latency for most of these services.
Why unsure: Few publish uptime figures, and independent latency tests cover only a few gateways (ComputeSDK and Edgee measured Vercel, Cloudflare and OpenRouter).
How long the below-list channels will last.
Why unsure: None of the services selling below list price publishes an agreement with the model makers.
Common questions
Answer first, then why, an example, the limits and what to do next.
What is the best AI API aggregator?
APIMODELS is our pick for the lowest prices under one key, with official MCP and Agent Skills, and it is our own product, so read the note at the top. OpenRouter is the broadest pass-through at list price plus a 5.5% fee; Vercel and Cloudflare suit teams already on their platforms; fal and Replicate lead for image and video models.
What is the best OpenRouter alternative?
Vercel AI Gateway is the closest alternative with no top-up fee: the makers' list prices, 400+ models and bring-your-own-key. Requesty adds EU routing for a 5% fee, Cloudflare AI Gateway suits Cloudflare users at 5%, and APIMODELS, our own product, sells many models below list price.
Which AI API aggregator is the cheapest?
Kie.ai, APIMODELS and CometAPI list the lowest prices for many closed models, below the makers' own rates, but none says how it obtains the access. Among relays that pass list prices through, Vercel AI Gateway, NanoGPT and Inworld add no top-up fee.
Which AI API aggregators support MCP?
Ten of the 21 run an official MCP server that can call models: OpenRouter, APIMODELS, AI/ML API, Eden AI, NanoGPT, Inworld, Atlas Cloud, fal, Replicate and WaveSpeedAI. Vercel, Cloudflare, Kilo, OpenCode, Chutes and Novita have servers that manage accounts, platforms or GPUs rather than run models.
Can I pay for an AI API relay with Alipay or WeChat?
Six of the 21 take Alipay: OpenRouter, APIMODELS, ZenMux, OpenCode Zen, WaveSpeedAI and Atlas Cloud, and the last three also take WeChat Pay. Payment does not change the makers' regional rules: Anthropic and OpenAI do not list mainland China as a supported region.
Are AI API relays safe to use?
Relays with a named company, published terms and a status page are safer than anonymous ones, but every relay sees your prompts. OpenCode reported a breach of saved provider keys in October 2026, and users of several relays report banned accounts and lost credits; keep spend limits on every key.
Is there a free AI API aggregator?
OpenRouter, Kilo Gateway, Requesty and OpenCode Zen offer free models with daily or hourly limits, and Vercel gives 5 USD of monthly credit for some models. Free models may log prompts or use them for training, so check each one's terms.
Collection created: 21 AI API aggregators side by side, every cell read on the service's own pages or in a named public test, each column linked to its full review.
VideoEnhancer is a web tool that upscales short MP4 clips to 1080p, 2K or 4K with the FlashVSR model and also compresses, face-swaps and generates video. After a 5-second free trial, 1080p costs 3 credits a second, $0.03 to $0.09 depending on how credits are bought. VideoEnhancer is our own product: it is made by the team behind GenGrades.
LayerGrab splits a flat image into up to 16 named, transparent layers over a filled-in background, on the web, in Figma or in Chrome, or pulls out only what you name. Each layer costs $0.10 on its $12 plan, $0.08 on Premium. No independent review exists yet. LayerGrab is our own product: it is made by the team behind GenGrades.
VideoTextRemover is a web tool that erases burned-in subtitles, captions and other on-screen text from MP4 and MOV videos and repaints what was behind them, up to 1080p. It bills per second processed, about $0.025 to $0.049, with 30 free seconds a month in some countries. VideoTextRemover is our own product: it is made by the team behind GenGrades.
MagicRemover is a browser tool that erases people, objects, text, logos and watermarks from photos, and subtitles from videos. Photos get 2 free removals a day, 2 more after sign-in, at about 1 megapixel; beyond that, credits start at $9.90 for 330. MagicRemover is our own product: it is made by the team behind GenGrades.