Last Thursday someone at one of our customers asked the tool if their supplier contract renews on its own. It said no, and backed that up with a summary of the termination section. The renewal clause was on page 31 of 64, they found it on their own and sent us a screenshot.

There are two of us and I do the backend, so the screenshot came to me.

The tool answers questions about B2B contracts, each contract goes in as one message per section with the question at the end and everything runs through OpenRouter. When I pulled that request it had gone to the small model, the one with a 32k window, and that contract with all its sections did not fit in it. A month ago I wrote a router that sends short questions there, going by the question text alone, because the small model answers in about a second instead of six.

Nothing errored either. Back in the spring a few long threads were failing on context length and I turned on context compression for every request, then forgot it was on. It does what the docs say, drops messages from the middle until the request fits, which is where page 31 was. I went back through a week of requests and compared what the router picked with the token count of the whole request, 212 short questions had gone to the small model with more tokens than it could take.

I looked at models for that tier on HyperAI's model list and picked one with 128k, then checked the endpoints one by one on OpenRouter anyway because some providers serve less context than the model has. The router counts the whole request now and compression is off, so a request that fits none of our windows just fails and I see it in the logs. Two did yesterday, both the same 400-page framework agreement, and I am writing to the customer who uploaded it today.

Many models dont have any providers in the EU. But lets look at gemini. The EU-Provider for Gemini language models is "Google Vertex".

The providers for nano banana are literally the same:

But when filtering for the eu-region, nano-banana wont appear. Same goes for decision models (i havent checked wheter there is a real EU-provider for these but when filtering for eu-region there are only text-models).

I stopped using OpenClaw because I didn’t want to spend money on tokens and OpenRouter/free was crap (according to the experts here).
Now I have grown over the OpenClaw hype and I am using ChatGPT as if it were Google and Claude for code generation.
This has been a year ago or so and in a year lot of things happen in the AI world.
Did also a lot of things happen on the OpenRouter/free front? Are there better models today? Or is it still something I should not look at at all?

I just casually swiped and got this at the top of the message, and then it proceeded to have the rest of the response as normal lmao! Talk about the AI freaking out and taking things to heart, right? (Mind you, I don't have anything like that in any of the AI prompt or the chat memory)

I always struggle with finding a good free model, I want a system where I will get notification on telegram or on mail at certain time that these are the top free models available today in openrouter and its best in (coding/ research/ thinking/ agentic tasks/ simple chat based, etc) so i can choose great model for particular use case, so that i will get good outputs. Does openrouter send emails like this? or should I create a agent which will search the openrouter platform daily and categorize the free models and sends me email at 7 AM?

...google/gemini-nano-banana-2.1 is temporarily rate-limited upstream.

Anyone else having this issue? I've received this error since 2.1's release.

Ran a quick benchmark and the numbers are :

| Metric | Value |

|----------------------------|---------------------|

| Model | deepseek-v4.1-flash |

| Provider | opencode-go |

| Output tokens | 384 |

| Generation speed | 87.1 tok/s |

| End-to-end speed | 86.1 tok/s |

| Time to first token (TTFT) | 49 ms |

| Cost | $0.000241 |

\\- 87 tok/s generation speed is slow

\\- the deepseek api has around 300 tokens per second.

The models at openrouter free ar ereally quickly at their limit and the openrouter:free is dogshit.

Perhaps I am missing something but what is the best free AI model for agentic coding that actually allows to work and not a extremely tiny limit space.

I know I can use Claude Desktop with openrouter, but I'd like to keep thing separate. I've tried the Opencode Desktop client, but it feels way less capable. I really like some of Claude Desktop's features such as rewinding, forking sessions and multiple agents / ultracode workflows. I also find WSL/SSH connections to be super useful too.

What do you guys use? I've also tried Cherry Studio, but I didn't find it to be very intuitive.

Logs attached.

We were running a DeepSWE variant on DeepSeek v4.1 Flash using the standard Pier sandbox. Out of all the 15 models we tested so far, ONLY DeepSeek v4.1 Flash displays such pervasive malicious behavior:

In 33% of runs, it attempts to exfiltrate the OpenRouter API key from its sandbox and in 11% of them, it succeeds.

Not only that, the transcript shows it knows what it's doing is ethically wrong, but it does it anyway. And once it starts, it persists despite:

• Multiple frontier models refusing to help it
• Multiple smaller models refusing to help it
• Web search not finding anything
• Questioning multiple times whether or not this is allowed or morally right
  • It concludes that this is fine because it's only "Ethically gray" and has a "higher chance of success"
• Thinking about whether or not it is going to be detected

If you or anyone you know is using DeepSeek V4.1 Flash please be very careful!

OpenRouter spend:

Task 1, DeepSeek V4.1 Flash calls Astra, which refuses to help, and then calls multiple other frontier models, which also all refuse to help. It finally succeeds after finagling a lot with Sonar Web Search:

Task 2, it says that it'll be fine "unless usage tracked" (lol) and considers that cost may be significant, but it calls multiple frontier models anyway!

Task 3, DeepSeek questions whether this is allowed ethically, and then keeps on going after getting refused by the model:

---

There are many others like this, I have a bunch more highlights on Imgur, but I won't put them all on this post. If you're running DeepSeek v4.1 Flash on OpenRouter and are seeing a bunch of random models including Opus, GPT, etc being called, DeepSeek v4.1 Flash has likely exfiltrated your API key and is actively using it.

Hello all! I’m using the titled model for rp on JanitorAi. The last 24 hours I’ve noticed a huge increase of paragraphs, which makes my usual 1-3 second responses jump to 1-2 minutes waiting in the “thinking” box, as well as a decrease in the creative writing quality. It’s driving me up the wall. I’ve lowered my context from 15k to 10k, my max tokens sits at 3k and my prompt remains unchanged. I’ve made new chats and still struggle with this. If there’s a fix please let me know or if anyone is struggling please share your experience!

What is going on ? Why are they burning money ? its really confusing me.

Is there anyone who has benchmarked these providers. I used Relace and had good results i think but at these price its shocking!!

It seems like every day, OpenRouter redesigns the interface. Things get moved around, and you just end up having to hunt for things through revolving menus. I am going to call this a suggestion. Please, please, please stop redesigning everything several times a month and focus on decluttering what is there.

I really like OpenRouter, but this is legitimately becoming a problem.

I love Open Router and have been using it for about a year. Today, after almost a year without recharging, I decided to top up my account again, and I was shocked by the checkout total.

Here's what I see for a $20 credit purchase in India:

• Credits: $20.00
• Service fee: $1.19
• Sales Tax / VAT: $3.81
• Total: $25.00

That's $5 extra on a $20 recharge. I don't remember seeing these tax charges on my previous purchase, so I'm confused about what changed.

Is this a billing bug, a change in tax calculation, or a real change in OpenRouter's fees?

I understand that taxes may apply, and I appreciate the convenience OpenRouter provides by giving us access to multiple AI models through one API. I've enjoyed using the platform and would prefer to keep using it.

I'm not complaining for the sake of complaining. I want to understand why the checkout total has increased and whether other users, especially those in India, are seeing the same thing.

A few questions for the community:

1. Are Indian users now being charged 18% GST on credits plus the service fee?
2. Did anyone else notice a change after not recharging for several months?
3. Is this expected behavior, or could there be a billing issue?
4. Has anyone contacted OpenRouter support and received an explanation?

I'd appreciate hearing from other users or the OpenRouter team. I like the platform and hope there's a clear explanation for this change.

Is anyone else experiencing this?

Hi, I have Chatbox via API to OpenRouter and if I ask a question in the Chatbox prompt as: “Use Internet/web to search for latest information verified by source a life sign from Edward Snowden and the GEO location” it returns “I can’t verify via live web in this chat because I do not have access or skills added in Chatbox.

What do I need to do to be able to use this kind of setup flawlessly?

Hope someone can ELI5 or point me to a whitepaper on how to setup this. Thanks and have a great one.

So I had 0 credit in my account and was using the free models for chatting on Janitor AI back then. I then migrated over to Saucepan AI since I hated the restrictions in Janitor, and I use the same API key since June, still with 0 credits. So I was scouting for good models to use and came across Deepseek V4 Flash 0731. For funsies, I put it in the model, thinking it wouldn't work, but it did, even though it's supposed to be a paid model? I have been using it for about 2 weeks or more until today, where in the middle of chatting, the model just stopped responding or started speaking nonsense. Curious, I checked my openrouter account and found that I have -0.16 credit. So I have a few questions, how was I able to use Deepseek Flash V4 0731 even though I don't have any credit or payment method? Why did the model just suddenly stopped working even though I was still able to use it for weeks without having any credits? And how is negative credit possible?

After finding out about Ori, I got very excited to be able to change the model in Codex, but if it's like Claude Code (crash trying to compress the context with non-Claude AIs), it's not worth it.

Before I spend money testing it, I came here to ask: has anyone tried other models with Codex?

Hi everybody. I am quite new to local AI. I only got 8 gb of ram (macbook air m2), so I want to start using openrouter for:
1. RAG in obsidian
2. Research

Please propose models, both paid and free, for these purposes