OpenRouter vs Leanroute.

OpenRouter is the category leader: 400+ models, a large community, live since 2023, and fee-free BYOK for most teams. For a lot of developers it is the right default. Leanroute is smaller and built for a narrower brief: APAC and India providers as first-class citizens, Singapore hosting, MCP tools that run at the gateway on any model, guardrails, and hard spend caps per key.

Snapshot date: October 2026. OpenRouter changes pricing and features often. Check openrouter.ai/docs before depending on a specific number.

TL;DR

Pick OpenRouter if you want the widest model choice, you bring your own keys and spend under $25,000 a month (their BYOK is free there), or you want the most established option. Pick Leanroute if you route to APAC or Indian providers, want Singapore hosting, want MCP tools executed at the gateway on any model, need guardrails and per-key hard caps in the same layer, or run BYOK volume well above $25,000 a month, where a flat subscription beats a 5% fee.

Where we differ

Dimension	Leanroute	OpenRouter
Fee on prepaid credits	2% at top-up plus card processing (from $10), models at provider list price	5.5% at credit purchase (5% crypto), models at provider list price
Fee on BYOK traffic	Flat $15 or $25/month subscription, no per-request fee	Free up to $25,000/month of list-price inference, then 5%
Models in catalog	100+ across 14 curated providers	400+, including a long tail of open-weight fine-tunes
APAC + India providers	First-class: Qwen, GLM, Doubao, Kimi, Sarvam, Krutrim	Some APAC models; check their catalog for your mix
Hosting	Singapore (compute, database and cache in-region)	Global, with US- or EU-locked inference on its Business tier
MCP tool calling	Gateway runs the tool loop on any model via `mcp_servers`, per-org allowlist	Check their docs for current tool and plugin support
Guardrails	7 rules (PII, secrets, prompt injection, moderation and more), block or redact	Check their docs
Spend controls	Daily and monthly hard caps per org and per key, plus RPM/TPM limits	Per-key credit limits
Cross-provider failover	Automatic same-tier failover on provider 5xx	Automatic provider fallbacks
Track record	Launched 2026	Live since 2023, large community

Rust-tinted cell: Leanroute leads. Muted cell: OpenRouter leads. No tint: tie or depends on your workload.

The cost math

On prepaid credits we add a 2% platform fee plus card processing at top-up, from $10; OpenRouter takes 5.5% at purchase. Both pass model prices through at list. The bigger difference is BYOK, and there OpenRouter is cheaper for most teams.

BYOK inference / month	Leanroute (Pro)	OpenRouter	Cheaper
$1,000	$1,025	$1,000	OpenRouter by $25
$10,000	$10,025	$10,000	OpenRouter by $25
$50,000	$50,025	$51,250	Leanroute by $1,225
$100,000	$100,025	$103,750	Leanroute by $3,725

Below $25,000 a month of BYOK inference, OpenRouter charges nothing and we charge a flat subscription, so price is not a reason to pick us there. Above it, their 5% fee grows with volume and ours does not. Enterprise OpenRouter plans raise the free allowance to $200,000 a month, which moves that crossover a long way up.

Cache hits from our exact and semantic caches are billed at $0, which lowers the upstream bill on repetitive workloads whichever plan you are on. Run your own numbers at /calculator.

Provider catalog

OpenRouter has far more models in absolute terms. That matters when you need a specific fine-tune from the long tail. For the frontier models most production traffic uses (OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, xAI, DeepSeek), both cover the same ground.

Where we put the effort is APAC and India: Qwen, GLM, Doubao and Kimi with vision routing, plus Sarvam and Krutrim for Indic languages, each wired as a first-class provider with its own pricing and failover rather than a catalog listing. Full catalog at /models.

Data residency

We are a Singapore company with compute, database and cache in Singapore. OpenRouter offers US- or EU-locked inference on its Business tier. If your requirement is APAC hosting, we fit; if it is EU or US, they do.

Our posture against PDPA, PDPO, GDPR, PIPL, APPI and DPDP is at /compliance.

Where OpenRouter still wins

Model breadth. 400+ models. If your workload depends on a long-tail fine-tune, they carry it and we may not.
BYOK cost under $25k/month. Free, versus our flat subscription.
Track record. Live since 2023, a much bigger community, and more third-party quickstarts.
US and EU hosting options. If your buyers need inference locked to the US or EU, that is their Business tier, not us.