OpenAI: gpt-oss-20b (free)

Different companies host the same model. OpenRouter routes your request to one of them based on the routing mode you pick — Balanced (price + speed), Nitro (fastest), or Exacto (one fixed provider).

Throughput is how fast the model writes (tokens per second — higher is better). Latency is total round-trip time (lower is better). TTFT is time-to-first-token — how long before you see anything appear (lower is better).

List price is the headline rate per million tokens. Effective price is what you actually pay after prompt caching is applied — for repeated context, this can be 60–80% cheaper. The chart below shows the rolling effective price over the past 30 days.

Scores on standardized evaluations. Higher percentages are better — and rank percentile shows where this model lands among all models on OpenRouter.

Public apps that send the most traffic to this model. Good signal for what real production workloads look like — and a hint at which use cases this model is best suited for.

Token volume and request traffic to this model over time.

Percent of requests that succeeded over the last 30 days. OpenRouter monitors every provider continuously and automatically retries on the next-best provider when one returns an error.

Drop-in code to call this model. OpenRouter's API is OpenAI-compatible — most SDKs work by just swapping the base URL. The only thing that changes between models is the model slug below.