Requesty vs OpenRouter: which hosted AI gateway costs less and fits your stack?

Choose OpenRouter when breadth and ecosystem matter most: 500+ models from 80+ providers, automatic fallback routing, caching, a remote MCP server and client SDKs that drop in for the OpenAI SDK. You prepay USD credits; model prices pass through at list price and the 5.5% platform fee applies to the top-up (8% on the Business plan, which adds EU/US in-region routing).

Choose Requesty when you want a slightly lower, simpler fee or need EU data residency without an upgraded plan: 600+ models from 20+ providers at the model cost plus 5%, so a $10 per million token model costs $10.50. Bring-your-own-keys, spend limits per key and an MCP gateway are included on pay-as-you-go, with no per-seat pricing or minimum spend.

OpenRouter: prepaid credits, no inference markup, 5.5% platform fee on Standard top-ups and 8% on Business. Bring-your-own-key traffic is fee-free up to $25,000 a month of list-price inference, then 5%. Enterprise adds SSO/SAML and SLAs on custom terms.

Requesty: pay as you go at model cost plus 5% on every paid request, including high-volume traffic. Bring your own provider keys on pay-as-you-go. Enterprise is custom and adds SSO, RBAC, audit logs and SLAs. Because the markup is per request rather than per top-up, the effective rate is the same whether you spend $20 or $20,000.

OpenRouter's free tier gives 25+ free models across 4 providers at 50 requests a day; limits scale with lifetime credits (20 RPM and 50 RPD under $10 of lifetime credits, 20 RPM and 1,000 RPD at $10 or more). The free-tier rate limits are account-wide.

Requesty's free plan covers free models only, at 200 requests a day, with routing, caching and analytics included and no credit card required. Neither free tier is meant for production load; both are for trying the gateway.

OpenRouter logs metadata only by default; opting into prompt logging earns a 1% discount. In-region EU/US routing is a Business plan feature at the 8% fee.

Requesty offers EU data residency on every plan, including free and pay-as-you-go, which is the clearest reason to pick it over OpenRouter for teams with European customers. Both are hosted services, so requests and metadata pass through the provider's infrastructure.

Developers who want the widest model catalog, published per-model prices and the largest community pick OpenRouter; it is the default hosted gateway most tools document.

Teams that know their monthly spend and want the lower flat markup, or that need EU residency without the Business tier, pick Requesty. If you would rather pay nothing per token and run a gateway yourself, OmniRoute or LiteLLM cover that path; see the OmniRoute vs OpenRouter and OpenRouter vs LiteLLM comparisons.