How to Use OpenRouter
A practical five-step guide for testing models, estimating cost and moving from the OpenRouter playground into production.
Create an OpenRouter account
Sign up at openrouter.ai with Google, GitHub or email. A free account is enough to browse models and start testing in the web UI.
Keep an API key ready if you plan to move from testing to production calls.
Pick a model for your task
Start by task type: coding, long documents, multimodal intake, high-volume extraction or agent workflows. Do not pick by hype alone.
Shortlist two models and run the same five real tasks before deciding.
Test in the OpenRouter playground
Open the model page, enter a representative prompt and inspect the answer. For agents, test tool calls and structured output too.
Save your prompt, expected output and failure cases so you can compare fairly.
Estimate monthly cost
Use pricing per million tokens and your real input/output ratio. Long-context and high-volume workloads can change the cheapest option quickly.
Check the calculator page before committing to a provider.
Wire the API into your app
OpenRouter exposes an OpenAI-compatible interface. Replace the model ID with the one you selected and keep your key in server-side environment variables.
Log model ID, token usage and latency from day one.
Choose your first model
Start with the comparison table, then validate with your own tasks before moving to production.