The short answer
Choose Model.sale when you want one key, a small curated catalog, a prepaid USD wallet and a simple per-million blended rate. Choose OpenRouter when breadth, provider selection, fallbacks and access to hundreds of models matter more than keeping the billing surface small.
Neither product is automatically cheaper. The result depends on the model, input/output mix, cache treatment, fees, retries and the value of routing during an outage.
Billing shape
Model.sale publishes one blended charge per million charged tokens for each model. Funds are reserved before dispatch and settled from terminal usage; the dashboard exposes the request-level charge and ledger entry.
OpenRouter documents model/provider pricing as separate prompt, completion, cache and sometimes request or reasoning units. Its pay-as-you-go plan also applies a credit purchase fee. That can be a good trade for breadth, but a comparison must include the credit fee and the exact token mix.
Catalog and routing
OpenRouter states that its pay-as-you-go plan includes 400+ models and 70+ providers, with fallbacks and auto-routing options. This is useful when a model has multiple healthy suppliers or when you need a long tail of open and closed models.
Model.sale is intentionally narrower: the public catalog contains only models with a recent compatibility check, a price version and a working usage policy. It does not silently substitute another model when the requested route is unavailable.
A fair workload comparison
Take one representative day: for example, 800,000 input tokens and 200,000 output tokens, including the percentage that was cache hits. Apply each service's documented input, cached-input, output, request and payment-fee rules. Then add retries and the cost of failed or fallback attempts where the policy charges them.
For Model.sale, apply the published blended rate to the charged-token total and include the minimum request charge only when it applies. For OpenRouter, use the exact model/provider row and include the credit purchase fee. Do not compare a blended number with an input-only number.
Reliability and control
A router can improve availability by selecting another provider, but it also introduces more moving parts: provider policies, regional latency, fallback semantics and potentially different model behavior. A curated route is easier to reason about when you need a stable endpoint and a small operational surface.
Whichever option you choose, set per-key RPM, TPM, concurrency and spend limits. Keep separate keys for development and production, and verify streaming plus terminal usage before sending long-running agent traffic.
Decision checklist
Pick breadth if you need many providers, automatic routing or rapid model experimentation. Pick prepaid simplicity if you need a fixed budget, crypto top-ups, one documented endpoint and a short list of verified models.
Re-check the source pages before purchase: model catalogs, fees, limits and terms change. A dated comparison is a decision aid, not a permanent price promise.