Blog — OpenRouter Blog

How Much Does Claude Code Cost? Real Session Costs by Model

Claude Code is free to install, and what you pay for is the model it calls. We publish the median cost of real Claude Code sessions on OpenRouter by model and session length. This post shows those costs, why the first request costs the most, what a month of use comes to, and how to lower the bill.

October 30, 2026

Claude Opus vs Sonnet vs Haiku: Which Should You Use?

Use Claude Sonnet 5.5 as your default, Haiku 5.5 for high-volume and sub-agent work, and Opus 5.5 for long tasks where a mistake is costly. We compared the three on price, benchmarks, 11 coding tasks with hidden tests and a Claude Code bug fix. All three passed everything, so the difference was cost.

October 30, 2026

How to Extract Tables from a PDF with an LLM

Send a PDF to a model that reads files, with a strict JSON schema for one row, and you get typed rows back, even from scans and tables that run across pages. We tested five routes on five PDFs and found two failures that return a normal response with no error, and the checks that catch them.

October 29, 2026

How to Prevent Prompt Injection: 13 Attacks, Tested

If your app has a model read documents, emails or web pages, anyone who writes in them can try to give it instructions. We ran 25 attacks against four current models with each defense on and off. Labels cut attack emails, but only checking every tool call with Armor stopped all of them.

October 29, 2026

Claude 529 Overloaded: What It Means and How to Fix It

A 529 overloaded_error from Claude means Anthropic's API is out of capacity for the model you asked for, not that your key or plan is wrong. This guide shows how to retry with backoff, send the same Claude model to another provider through OpenRouter, add a fallback model, and stop the error in Claude Code.

October 28, 2026

Hit Your Claude Code Usage Limit? How to Keep Coding

When Claude Code hits your plan's five-hour or weekly limit, you can keep working by pointing it at an OpenRouter API key. You pay per token for the same Claude models, with no usage window. This guide sets it up as a separate command, checks the cost, and switches back when your plan resets.

October 28, 2026

How we rebuilt provider routing for better, faster inference

Our default routing used to send most traffic to the cheapest provider for a model. The new routing algorithm constantly monitors the performance of every provider endpoint to optimize the balance of cost, speed, and reliability for each new request.

October 28, 2026

CSAM Screening Across OpenRouter

OpenRouter will screen all inference requests for child sexual abuse material (CSAM) as they pass through our service. Screening happens in flight, during request processing. Content flagged as potential CSAM may be retained for human review, with reporting and preservation where required by law.

October 27, 2026

Private Endpoints: Bring Your Fine-Tuned Models and Capacity to OpenRouter

Private Endpoints let Enterprise customers route their own fine-tuned models and dedicated deployments through OpenRouter, alongside the public catalog. Private endpoints are only visible within your organization, and requests go through the API your team already uses. Available by request on the Enterprise plan.

October 14, 2026

ElevenLabs is now on OpenRouter

ElevenLabs is now on OpenRouter with 9 Text to Speech and 2 Speech to Text models. Deliver speech with human-like emotion with Eleven v4, give your agent low-latency replies with v4 Turbo, and turn meetings into notes that show who said what with Scribe v2. Here's which model to pick, and one project built start to finish.

October 7, 2026

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How Much Does Claude Code Cost? Real Session Costs by Model

OpenRouter is Joining Stripe

Ori Eval: Find the Best Model for What You're Building

Surpassing Frontier Performance with Fusion

Claude Opus vs Sonnet vs Haiku: Which Should You Use?

How to Extract Tables from a PDF with an LLM

How to Prevent Prompt Injection: 13 Attacks, Tested

Claude 529 Overloaded: What It Means and How to Fix It

Hit Your Claude Code Usage Limit? How to Keep Coding

How we rebuilt provider routing for better, faster inference

CSAM Screening Across OpenRouter

Private Endpoints: Bring Your Fine-Tuned Models and Capacity to OpenRouter

ElevenLabs is now on OpenRouter