Cheapest LLM API: how to actually shop for cost per token

Comparing LLM APIs on price usually means comparing the provider's own per-token rate. That's only one input. The number that lands on your invoice is the provider's rate, plus whatever the gateway in front of it adds, minus whatever you get for free before any of that even applies.

• The provider's list price — set by OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, and so on; a gateway doesn't control this.
• The markup a gateway adds on top of that price for pay-as-you-go traffic.
• Whether a free tier or Go credit covers your usage before markup applies at all.
• Whether you can route the same request on a key you already pay the provider for directly.

Everything below comes down to which of those four levers you can actually pull.

The biggest lever is the second one — markup — and the way to remove it entirely is BYOK. Attach a provider key you already pay for and AnyRouter charges nothing on top: no per-request fee, no surcharge, no minimum, across 60+ supported providers. You pay the provider's own rate, full stop.

curl https://anyrouter.dev/api/v1/chat/completions \
-H "Authorization: Bearer $ANYROUTER_API_KEY" \
-H "Content-Type: application/json" \
-d '{
  "model": "anyrouter/byok",
  "messages": [{ "role": "user", "content": "Hello" }]
}'

If a BYOK key runs dry mid-project, the request can fall through to pay-as-you-go credits automatically — a burned key stops the work from failing, it just stops that particular call from being free.

Before markup even enters the picture, there's a free tier: anyrouter/free routes to healthy free-tier capacity on the Go plan ($2/mo, or donate a key), capped at 1,000 requests/day, no credit spend. Pro ($10/mo), Pro+ ($45/mo), and Max ($100/mo) raise the rolling rate-limit window as usage grows.

Whichever plan you're on, BYOK traffic never touches these credits — it's a separate, always-free path.

There's a fourth lever most people miss: if a provider key isn't using its full rate limit, donate the spare capacity to the shared pool. Every request the pool routes through your key returns 8% of that request's notional token cost to your AnyRouter balance, and donating one working key also makes Go free — you skip the $2/mo entirely.

Read the full mechanics at /blog/shared-key-pool, or go straight to /donate to add a key.

Per-token prices change as providers update their rates, so the honest way to shop is current numbers on /models rather than a figure printed here. What doesn't change is the structure: no markup on BYOK, a free daily tier, and a $1 entry plan if you want more than that.

• Browse current per-model pricing — /models.
• Try a model before committing — /playground.
• Connect a key you already pay for — /byok.