Service update · OpenRouter
OpenRouter's new default routing weighs price, speed and reliability
- Announcement time
- Review updated
OpenRouter has rebuilt how it picks providers by default, calling it its biggest routing change yet. Instead of mostly sorting by input price, it now scores every endpoint in real time on actual price, time to first token, throughput, rate-limit (429) errors, other errors and tool-call quality. Endpoints close to the best share the traffic, and struggling ones get less until they recover. It still takes prompt caching into account. OpenRouter's own numbers: median time to first token down 16.9%, throughput up 16.3% and 429 errors down 67%, with cost per request up 6.0%. Who's affected: if you don't set provider.sort or provider.order, you're switched over automatically with no code changes. If you use provider.only or provider.ignore, the new router chooses among the providers you allow. Want the old cheapest-first behavior? Set provider.sort to price, add :floor to the model slug, or make price your default sort in account settings.