Smart SelectionEvaluates all available providers for each model and picks the best one based on current latency, cost, and health.
Automatic RetriesTransparent failover to another provider when the primary returns an error. No retry logic needed in your code.
Custom PreferencesOverride routing to prefer cheapest, fastest, or a specific provider. Fine tune the tradeoff between cost and speed.
Real world impact
Consider a production chatbot serving thousands of users. If you call Anthropic's API directly and Anthropic has a 30 minute outage, your chatbot is down for 30 minutes. With OpenRouter, the same request automatically routes to a different provider hosting a comparable model, and your users never notice the disruption.