Individual skill

openrouter-pricing-basics

Understand OpenRouter pricing, calculate costs, and optimize spend. Use when budgeting, comparing model costs, or tracking spend. Triggers: 'openrouter pricing', 'openrouter cost', 'model pricing', 'openrouter budget', 'how much does openrouter cost'.

skills/.curated/openrouter-pricing-basics/SKILL.md

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Repository stars (not skill ratings): 2,917
Repository last updated: Nov 12, 2026
License: MIT

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ai Repository topic
automation Repository topic
claude-code Repository topic
devops Repository topic
mcp Repository topic
ai-agents Repository topic
anthropic Repository topic
claude-code-plugins Repository topic
developer-tools Repository topic
llm Repository topic
saas Declared skill tag
openrouter Declared skill tag
pricing Declared skill tag
cost-optimization Declared skill tag
engineering Derived category

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SKILL.mdcore · 8,421 bytes
SKILL.mdcore · 8,421 bytes
SKILL.mdcore · 8,421 bytes
SKILL.mdcore · 8,421 bytes
SKILL.mdcore · 8,421 bytes
SKILL.mdcore · 8,421 bytes
SKILL.mdcore · 8,421 bytes
references/cost-comparison-tool.mddoc · 1,006 bytes
references/cost-optimization.mddoc · 995 bytes
references/credit-system.mddoc · 713 bytes
references/errors.mddoc · 478 bytes
references/examples.mddoc · 3,561 bytes
references/model-pricing-tiers.mddoc · 1,187 bytes
references/monitoring-costs.mddoc · 732 bytes

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# OpenRouter Pricing Basics

## Overview

OpenRouter charges per token with separate rates for prompt (input) and completion (output) tokens. Prices are listed per token in the models API (multiply by 1M for per-million rates). Credits are prepaid with a 5.5% processing fee ($0.80 minimum). Free models are available for testing and low-volume use.

## Prerequisites

- An OpenRouter API key (`sk-or-v1-...`) exported as `OPENROUTER_API_KEY` — see the `openrouter-install-auth` skill for setup
- `curl` and `jq` for the model-pricing and credit-balance queries
- Python 3.8+ with the OpenAI SDK plus the `requests` package for the cost-calculation and generation-endpoint snippets
- Prepaid credits for paid models — the public models/pricing endpoint needs no auth, but real completions require credits or a `:free` model

## Instructions