Both services give you one API key for many models through an OpenAI-compatible endpoint. The question for an Indian developer is what the difference costs and how you pay. This comparison was rebuilt on 2026-10-16 from the two services' public model catalogs and OpenRouter's FAQ, instead of from memory. I had no account with either, so I made no authenticated calls and did no latency testing. AICredits links on this site are affiliate links.
What do the two catalogs contain?
| AICredits | OpenRouter | |
|---|---|---|
| Models in the public catalog (2026-10-16) | 432 | 465 |
| IDs present in both | 323 | 323 |
| IDs only in this one | 109 | 142 |
| Catalog URL | api.aicredits.in/v1/models | openrouter.ai/api/v1/models |
| Billing currency | INR (rupee wallet) | USD ("the base currency is US dollars") |
| Payment methods | UPI, net banking, debit card via Razorpay, per its homepage | Major credit cards, AliPay and USDC crypto, per its FAQ |
| Fees | INR price = USD price x exchange rate x 1.05 in the catalog; the homepage also mentions a 5% platform fee | No markup on model prices; 5.5% ($0.80 minimum) on card credit purchases, 5% on crypto |
| Free models | 2 flagged free (both music previews) | 15 IDs ending in :free; 50 free-model requests a day without credits, 1,000 with at least 10 credits |
The catalogs are public and need no key. OpenRouter lists more models, and AICredits has a different long tail. If you need a niche model, search both for the exact ID before you decide. The AICredits catalog analysis shows how to do this.
Are the prices the same?
In dollars, for most shared models, yes. I compared the 315 shared chat models that have a price in both catalogs:
- For 260 of them, the USD input price per token was equal (to three decimal places of the ratio).
- Across all 315 the median ratio of AICredits to OpenRouter was 1.000, for both input and output prices.
- A minority differ, with ratios from 0.25 to 20.5. I did not investigate individual cases; they may be different variants sharing an ID, tiered pricing, or stale entries on one side.
That fits what the two services say: OpenRouter passes provider prices through without markup, and AICredits' USD prices matched Anthropic's own price list for five models I checked. So the real difference is not the list price. It is what each service adds on top, and what your bank adds.
A worked example in rupees
Take 10,000 calls to openai/gpt-4o-mini with 500 input and 200 output tokens each: 5 million input tokens and 2 million output tokens.
- USD list price: $0.15 per million input and $0.60 per million output, so 5 x 0.15 + 2 x 0.60 = $1.95. Both catalogs list these prices for this model.
- AICredits (catalog INR prices): Rs 14.98 per million input and Rs 59.91 per million output, so Rs 194.72. That uses the catalog's 95.10014 rupees per dollar and its 1.05 factor.
- OpenRouter: $1.95 at the same exchange rate is Rs 185.45. Add the 5.5% fee on the credit purchase, and it is about Rs 195.65, before any foreign-transaction charge from your bank or card network.
The totals are within about half a percent of each other. What decides it in practice:
- Your card's own FX fee. Many Indian cards add a foreign-transaction charge. I did not verify any bank's rate, so check yours.
- OpenRouter's minimum. A 5.5% fee with a $0.80 minimum means a $5 card top-up pays the $0.80, which is 16%. Buy credits in larger lumps.
- AICredits' possible extra fee. The homepage mentions a 5% platform fee in small print, and I could not confirm whether wallet debits include it beyond the catalog price. One real charge settles this.
- Whether you can pay at all. The FAQ I read for OpenRouter lists cards, AliPay and crypto, not UPI, and does not say whether Indian-issued cards work. If you cannot fund it, price is moot.
Is the migration really two lines?
The base URL and key change. Model IDs often do not, but some do. Check these from the two catalogs:
| ID | In AICredits | In OpenRouter |
|---|---|---|
openai/gpt-4o-mini | yes | yes |
openai/gpt-6-luna | yes | yes |
deepseek/deepseek-r1 | yes | yes |
anthropic/claude-sonnet-4 | yes | no |
anthropic/claude-3.5-haiku | yes | no |
anthropic/claude-sonnet-4-20250514 (used in an earlier version of this post) | no | no |
google/gemini-2.0-flash (used earlier) | no | no |
The last two rows matter: the earlier version of this article listed IDs that exist on neither service today. The lesson is to look IDs up. The model ID lookup script works for AICredits, and the migration checklist covers a full switch.
from openai import OpenAI
# OpenRouter
client = OpenAI(api_key="sk-or-...", base_url="https://openrouter.ai/api/v1")
# AICredits
client = OpenAI(api_key="sk-...", base_url="https://api.aicredits.in/v1")
What about failover, budgets and latency?
AICredits' homepage claims automatic failover and per-key budgets. I did not test either. I did not read OpenRouter's routing documentation for this update, so I will not compare features I have not checked. On latency, I have no measurements for either: the earlier version quoted a range of 20 to 80 milliseconds without data, and I removed it. To measure your own route, use the latency benchmark method.
When to use which
- AICredits if you want to pay in rupees with UPI or net banking, and a rupee price you can read from a public catalog. Verify the first charge against the catalog.
- OpenRouter if you already have working USD payment, need a model only it lists, or want its free-model allowance for experiments.
- Both, in config, if you want redundancy: the fallback wrapper switches providers on failure.
Before you commit to either, run the conformance test on the exact model you will use. To try AICredits, sign up here (affiliate link) and start with a small wallet. For the service itself, read the AICredits review.
What I could not verify
- Any authenticated behaviour of either service.
- Whether Indian-issued cards work on OpenRouter.
- Whether AICredits wallet debits equal the catalog price.
- Latency, reliability or routing quality of either.
