Openrouter Reviews 

Deleted 100% of my chats without warning or permission. I was a paying customer and at no point chose any setting to do this. I logged in one day and all my chats were gone. When I reached out to get support for the issue they responded with a fake letter from a bot. DO NOT USE.

September 2026 Update: These people are fraudsters. Attempting to use Anthropic models results in failed responses, but you are charged anyway. Bringing it up to support with logs from their own site showing this (and images of the failed prompt and error messages), resulted in being ignored with no response. This is genuine fraud.

They will steal your money! 24hr refund policy that’s buried in fine print! Stay away from the crooks! I could not get the openrouter API to work, kept crashing and just was not reliable. Tried for 4 days. Went to get a refund on my 100 bucks and was told no due to their refund policy! I’m like who has a refund policy of 24hrs! They do becasue they know most people will have issues getting the services to work and with a 24hr refund policy that’s just built in revenue. Yes they keep your money after 365 days of it sitting in the account! Crooks!

Worthless freaking company and website, no support when you run into issues. At first I couldn't even give them money cause it said I needed to verify my email, which I did, then stuck in an endless LOOP. I ended up making a new account and giving them 5 bucks which never registered, still said 0.00. Then used 1 image tool that was suppose to be free and it wasn't. And my balance is -0.04. This company is a JOKE!

Very bad customer service obvious bait and switch like how can you be so greedy like openrouter your squeezing the life out of us free users your taking away our free models and downgrading them why can't you just give us a free model and paid model of the Same flag ship model you greedy unresponsible company damn your greed and awful service I hate you from the deepest pits if my heart for ruining my roleplays with your stupid policies .

I decided to refund €25 in open router credits because I’m running a small business and saving for our new baby arriving soon. They kept the €6 in VAT, and only refunded the principle amount. As far as I’m aware this is illegal. Very shady, avoid them.

Horrible experience. Signed up to try out OpenClaw, put in 50$, and then had my account locked out within a day of setup and typical use. No explanation why, no response from customer support after a month, and the refund process doesn't even work. Save your time and money, just go with Vercel. It's cheaper, more reliable, and as much as I'd like to s**t on Vercel for some of their practices, at the very least, they won't just steal your money.

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.