Insights

Analysis, reports, and deep dives.

How OpenRouter Model Routing Works

OpenRouter routes every request across 60+ providers, and you control how: provider order, price ceilings, and the fallback chain. Here's how each routing layer works.

June 12, 2026

OpenRouter Reliability & Automatic Failover: How Requests Keep Succeeding

Provider failover is on by default. Model fallbacks are opt-in. The two layers recover from different failures; here's how each one works and where failover stops.

June 12, 2026

What Is an LLM Gateway? The Missing Layer Between Your App and AI Models

Without an LLM gateway, provider outages become user-facing errors and AI spend stays opaque. Compare the best options by routing, compliance, and setup time.

June 11, 2026

A Robot is Sprinting Towards You: Do You Want it Running on Claude or Grok?

A 30-game battle royale across eleven LLMs, $482 of inference, and one finding that should change how you read model benchmarks.

June 4, 2026

GPT-5.5 Price Increase: What It Actually Costs

OpenAI doubled per-token prices with GPT-5.5 but the model is less verbose. We measured real usage to see the net cost impact.

May 4, 2026

Opus 4.7's New Tokenizer: What It Actually Costs

Anthropic changed the tokenizer in Opus 4.7. We looked at usage that shifted from 4.6 to 4.7 to measure exactly how it affects costs.

April 27, 2026

The 2025 State of AI Report

Introducing the 2025 State of AI report, in partnership with a16z. The largest empirical look yet at how developers and organizations use language models in the real world.

December 4, 2025

Is Implicit Caching Prompt Retention?

Should customers consider providers that have implicit caching as “ZDR”?

October 23, 2025