DEV Community: RouterPlex

How We Price a Multi-Vendor LLM Gateway Without Marking Anything Up

RouterPlex — Sat, 11 Jul 2026 08:00:06 +0000

A lot of LLM proxies quietly add a margin on top of provider pricing — sometimes 10-20%, rarely disclosed clearly. When we built RouterPlex, we made a deliberate call to not do that.

How it works

Each of the 28 models we route to (Claude, GPT, DeepSeek, Qwen, MiniMax, and others) is billed to you at the same per-token rate the vendor publishes on their own pricing page. We keep a public pricing sheet so you can check it yourself rather than take our word for it.

Why this matters

If you're building a product on top of an LLM API, your margins are already thin enough without an invisible reseller markup baked into your infra costs. Transparent pricing also means our incentives are aligned with yours — we don't make more money by routing you to a more expensive model than you need.

The other half: payment access

The other problem we wanted to solve: getting a card that OpenAI or Anthropic billing will accept isn't guaranteed in every market. RouterPlex accepts crypto top-ups (USDT) with no KYC, in addition to standard card payment.

Try it

One OpenAI/Anthropic-compatible key, 28 models, works natively with Claude Code and VS Code's built-in chat.

https://dub.sh/kfrNlp4

Feedback (especially on pricing transparency — did we miss anything?) genuinely welcome.

RouterPlex: One API Key for 28 LLMs — Claude, GPT, DeepSeek, Qwen, MiniMax

RouterPlex — Thu, 09 Jul 2026 01:42:00 +0000

Most projects that touch multiple LLM providers end up with a pile of vendor SDKs, a pile of API keys, and separate billing relationships to manage. RouterPlex is a gateway that collapses that down to one key.

What it does

One OpenAI- and Anthropic-compatible API key routes to 28 models across providers — Claude, GPT, DeepSeek, Qwen, MiniMax, and more. If your tooling already speaks the OpenAI or Anthropic /v1/messages format, you don't rewrite anything:

curl https://dub.sh/no1oLNt \
  -H "Authorization: Bearer $ROUTERPLEX_KEY" \
  -H "Content-Type: application/json" \
  -d '{
    "model": "claude-sonnet-4-6",
    "messages": [{"role": "user", "content": "Hello"}]
  }'

It also works as a drop-in for Claude Code and VS Code's built-in AI chat — point the base URL at RouterPlex and pick any of the 28 models.

Why we built it

Two problems kept showing up for developers outside a handful of markets:

Billing access. Getting a card that OpenAI's or Anthropic's billing will actually accept isn't guaranteed everywhere. RouterPlex accepts crypto top-ups (USDT) with no KYC, alongside normal card payment.
Pricing trust. A lot of LLM proxies quietly mark up provider pricing. RouterPlex bills at the official vendor list price — you can check our sheet against the provider's own pricing page.

Where it's at

Early — a handful of real users so far, still finding rough edges. If you're building anything that touches multiple LLM providers, I'd genuinely appreciate you trying it and telling me what's broken or missing.

https://dub.sh/CZbfvUc

RouterPlex: one API key for 25+ AI models

RouterPlex — Mon, 06 Jul 2026 18:20:56 +0000

Every AI provider wants you to manage a separate account, learn a slightly different SDK, track its own quota, and pay its own invoice. Ship features against four or five of them and you're maintaining a small integrations department just to make API calls.

RouterPlex collapses all of that into one OpenAI-compatible endpoint.

What it does

25+ models, one endpoint — Claude Opus 4.8, GPT-5.5, Gemini 3.1, DeepSeek V4, and more, all behind the same URL and key.
Keep your existing code — it speaks the OpenAI API, so you point base_url at RouterPlex and swap the model string. No new SDK.
One prepaid balance, per-token billing — one invoice instead of eleven.
Hard spend limits on every key — a runaway loop can't drain your balance.
Automatic fallbacks — when a provider has an outage, requests route to a healthy model instead of failing.
Per-key analytics — see exactly where spend goes.

Using it

Change one line and you're routed:

curl https://dub.sh/kbeaNNe \
  -H "Authorization: Bearer $ROUTERPLEX_KEY" \
  -H "Content-Type: application/json" \
  -d '{ "model": "claude-opus-4-8", "messages": [{"role":"user","content":"Hello"}] }'

Want GPT-5.5 or DeepSeek V4 instead? Swap the model value. Same endpoint, same key, same bill.

Try it

There's $5 in free credit to start, no card required.

👉 [routerplex.com](https://dub.sh/ZmZHEZ5