What is OpenRouter?
OpenRouter is an LLM aggregator: one OpenAI-compatible API that routes each request to one of 300+ chat models from OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, Mistral and a long tail of open-source providers. Instead of an account per provider, you hold one OpenRouter account and choose the model by name in the request. It is text-only — chat and completion models — with no image, video or audio generation endpoints.
How the OpenRouter API works
You send a standard OpenAI-style chat completion to OpenRouter's base URL with your OpenRouter key, setting the model field to a namespaced slug such as anthropic/claude-sonnet or openai/gpt-4o. OpenRouter forwards the call to that provider, can fall back to alternates, and returns the OpenAI-shaped response. Because it speaks the OpenAI protocol, any OpenAI SDK works by pointing base_url at it. Kunavo works the same way — the difference is the catalog and what sits behind it.
OpenRouter pricing, and how Kunavo compares
OpenRouter charges the upstream provider's per-token price plus a small platform margin, funded from a prepaid wallet (crypto-first, cards supported). Kunavo takes the opposite position: every enabled model is published at roughly 30% under the provider's official list rate — Claude Sonnet 4.6 at $1.20/$6.00 per 1M tokens vs Anthropic's $3/$15, Gemini 2.5 Flash at $0.09/$0.75 vs Google's $0.30/$2.50. The per-1M rate for every model is on the /pricing page, so the comparison is direct.
OpenRouter API key vs Kunavo API key
An OpenRouter key authenticates against OpenRouter's text-model catalog only. A Kunavo key (sk-kunavo-…) authenticates against the same OpenAI-compatible chat endpoint plus image, video and audio endpoints and the native Anthropic Messages API — one credential for every modality, drawn from one Stripe-billed balance. Both are bearer tokens in the Authorization header, so moving across is a one-line base_url change plus the new key.
Where OpenRouter genuinely wins
If your product needs the long-tail of text-only chat models — Mistral fine-tunes, Llama variants, niche community models, experimental open-source — OpenRouter's catalog is unmatched. They also have the most mature crypto-native top-up flow, which matters if you operate in regions where cards are difficult. The community discussion around models, prompt techniques and benchmarks is also more active there.
Where Kunavo wins
Multimodal under one bill is the big one. The moment your product needs image generation, image editing, or video — OpenRouter doesn't cover those endpoints, so you'd be running two integrations and two billing relationships anyway. Kunavo gives you /v1/images, /v1/images/edits, /v1/video/generations and /v1/audio/music alongside chat, all OpenAI-shaped, all on the same wallet. The pricing also lands measurably lower: every enabled model is roughly 30% under the provider's official list price (we publish the per-1M-token rate on /pricing — easy to compare). Stripe-native checkout pulls in Apple Pay, Google Pay, ACH, SEPA, Alipay and WeChat Pay, which makes self-serve onboarding work outside the US and EU.
The honest takeaways
If you've already standardized on OpenRouter for text and your product never needs image or video, there's not a strong forcing function to switch — your existing OpenAI SDK code is portable to Kunavo (one base_url change), so you can keep both in your back pocket and migrate when the price gap becomes worth the integration time. If you're building anything multimodal, or you serve customers paying with local rails outside USD, Kunavo is the simpler stack. Either way, the test is small: a $5 top-up and one base_url change get you evaluating in minutes.