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OpenRouter

Made Crystal Clear

A practical, visual guide to reaching hundreds of AI models through one API key

OpenRouter puts one API key in front of hundreds of models from dozens of providers, and this book teaches the part that actually pays off: the routing. You will learn how a single request picks a provider, how to steer it by price, speed, or privacy, and how the variant suffixes (:free, :nitro, :floor and the rest) change what you get. You will get the fee math straight, credits, the card and crypto surcharges, BYOK, so no charge surprises you. And you will learn to read the public rankings for what they are: a real signal of adoption, and a poor proxy for quality.

Pages
123
Level
Beginner to advanced
Status
Available
Kindle · $12.99 ↗Paperback · $25.99 ↗Give feedback

Inside the book

  1. 01What OpenRouter Actually Is
  2. 02The Mental Model: One Key, Many Endpoints
  3. 03Your First Request
  4. 04What OpenRouter Actually Costs
  5. 05Provider Variance: Why the Same Model Isn't the Same Model
  6. 06Routing Controls: Taking the Wheel
  7. 07Choosing Models: Slugs, Variants, and the Catalog
  8. 08Staying Up: Fallback, Rate Limits, and Production Resilience
  9. 09Tool Calling and Server Tools
  10. 10Structured Outputs, Caching, and Multimodal Input
  11. 11Privacy, Data Retention, and What OpenRouter Can See
  12. 12What the Rankings Actually Measure
  13. 13The Company Behind the Router
  14. 14The Business Case: Going Direct, Enterprise, and the Alternatives
  15. 15The Playbook, Cheat Sheet, and Where to Go Next

You'll leave with

  • Send one request and let OpenRouter pick the provider
  • Steer routing by price, speed, or data policy
  • Decode the variant suffixes, :free, :nitro, :floor and more

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