OpenRouter is a hosted router that gives one API across hundreds of models and providers for a platform fee. Pages here cover replacing it with a self-hosted LiteLLM or Portkey gateway.
Comparing OpenRouter's hosted router with a self-hosted LiteLLM gateway: who holds provider contracts and keys, platform fees against running your own service, routing and fallbacks, spend controls, logging, and what LiteLLM Enterprise adds for SSO and audit logs.
Moving from OpenRouter to LiteLLM: opening direct accounts with the providers you use, mapping OpenRouter model names to LiteLLM model groups, issuing virtual keys with budgets, recreating fallbacks and provider preferences, and switching application base URLs without downtime.
Cost of ownership by component: OpenRouter's 5.5% or 8% fee on credit purchases and the 5% BYOK fee above the monthly allowance, against direct provider billing plus the servers, PostgreSQL, Redis and people needed to run LiteLLM, and the monthly spend where self-hosting pays off.
Comparing OpenRouter with Portkey's MIT-licensed gateway run on your own infrastructure: provider coverage, fallbacks, retries and load balancing, what you must add yourself for logging, keys and budgets, and which Portkey features stay in its paid plans.
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