The 5.5% Tax of OpenRouter — and Why I Built an Alternative

9 of the world's top 10 open-source LLMs are now Chinese. After GLM-5.2 landed, the

only non-Chinese model still in the top 10 is Llama. If your gateway taxes every call

by 5.5%, you are paying that tax to route to models you could reach for free.

The 5.5% you didn't notice you were paying

OpenRouter's pitch is fair: one key, 400+ models, transparent pricing.

But read the billing page closely. Every credit-card top-up adds 5.5% (minimum $0.80). Crypto top-ups add 5%. Token prices look "at cost" — until you check community benchmarks and notice DeepSeek-R1 routinely runs ~15% above what direct providers charge, depending on which underlying provider OpenRouter routes to that hour.

For a hobby project, this is invisible. For anyone running a real workload, the math gets uncomfortable fast.

$10,000 / month on inference  ->  ~$550 / month in routing tax

$100,000 / month                ->  ~$5,500 / month

$1,000,000 / month              ->  ~$55,000 / month

That's not a rounding error. That's an engineer's salary. And you're paying it to do something you could do with a Cloudflare Worker and ten lines of Go.

I built , top up nothing, and you get $1 in free trial credit — enough to hit DeepSeek-R1, Kimi K2, Qwen3, and GLM-4.6 a few hundred times each from the same key. No card. PayPal works. The base URL is https://api.haotokai.com/v1, the SDK is whatever you already use, and the migration from OpenRouter is the diff above.