model-access on tomrochette.com

Cerebras Code

tom@tomrochette.com (Tom Rochette) — Sat, 26 Sep 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Cerebras Code is a subscription from chipmaker Cerebras that sells fast inference on one open coding model at $50/month (Pro) and $200/month (Max). The pitch is speed, and the record shows the speed claim and the quota fine print are the two things to verify before paying.

What it is
#

A hosted coding-inference plan on Cerebras wafer-scale hardware, consumed by pointing any OpenAI-compatible editor or agent (Cline, OpenCode, Crush, Cursor) at a Cerebras API key. It launched August 1, 2025 with Qwen3-Coder-480B advertised at up to 2,000 tokens per second and a 131k context window. As of 2026-09-26 the product page promotes GLM 4.7 at “1,000 tokens+ per second”, so the headline model has already been swapped once.

Status
#

Launched August 1, 2025 and drew 449 points and 172 comments on Hacker News the same day. Launch windows sold out repeatedly, and as of 2026-09-26 both Pro and Max are marked “sold out” on cerebras.ai/code, with a limited free trial still open. The model changed from Qwen3-Coder to GLM 4.7 between launch and now, which shows the plan follows whichever open model is fastest rather than committing to one family. I could not verify funding or subscriber counts.

Strengths
#

Speed is genuinely differentiated: even its harshest reviewer calls Cerebras the fastest provider of its model, bar none.
Flat monthly pricing with published daily allowances (24M tokens Pro, 120M Max) instead of per-token anxiety.
Bring-your-own-editor stance with OpenAI-compatible endpoints, no proprietary IDE lock-in.
By October 2025 the original tokens-per-minute caps had been raised in response to criticism.

Cautions
#

The marketing number did not survive contact: InfoWorld measured well under 500 tokens/second and often under 100, against the “up to 2,000” claim.
Undocumented throttles drove the experience: 300k TPM on Pro and 400k on Max produced 429 errors mid-session, and an early buyer reported a 7.5M-token daily cap hidden behind an advertised 1,000-request limit.
131k context is about half the model’s native window and demands careful context management.
At launch there was no prompt caching, which made agent loops expensive at the $2/1M API rate, and the usage console had defects (a Max purchase provisioning as Pro).
Cerebras declined InfoWorld’s request for comment on these issues.

Pricing
#

Pro costs $50/month with up to 24M tokens/day, and Max costs $200/month with up to 120M tokens/day. Both plans were marked sold out as of 2026-09-26; a free tier with limited tokens remains for connection testing. The underlying API price at launch was $2 per 1M input and $2 per 1M output on Qwen3-Coder. The current per-token table on cerebras.ai/pricing renders client-side and I could not extract it, so treat current API rates as unverified.

Price history
#

Date	Plan	Change	Source
2025-08-01	Pro / Max	Launched at $50/month (24M tokens/day) and $200/month (120M tokens/day)	Cerebras blog and HN thread
2025-09-15	Pro / Max	TPM caps (300k/400k) documented as the binding limit; prompt caching promised	InfoWorld review
2025-10-28	Pro / Max	Caps reported improved; Qwen3 deprecated in favor of GLM-4.6 from November	InfoWorld follow-up
2026-09-26	Pro / Max	Prices unchanged at $50/$200 but both marked sold out; model now GLM 4.7	cerebras.ai/code

Compared to
#

- Chutes is the cheap multi-model pay-as-you-go option; choose Chutes for price and variety, Cerebras when seconds per response matter.
- GLM Coding Plan undercuts Cerebras on quota per dollar and now serves the same GLM family; choose it for volume, Cerebras for raw tokens per second.

Bottom line
#

Recommended for developers whose bottleneck is iteration latency and who code in bursts that fit the daily token allowance. Not for heavy all-day agent runs, where the TPM throttles and 131k context cut the advertised advantage. Claim to disagree with: at the documented throttles, Max at $200 was worse value than four Pro accounts, because 4x300k TPM beats 400k TPM.

Changes
#

2026-09-26 - Created.

References
#

https://www.cerebras.ai/blog/introducing-cerebras-code - launch post: $50/$200 tiers, 24M/120M tokens/day, 2,000 tok/s claim, 131k context (fetched, HTTP 200).
https://www.cerebras.ai/blog/qwen3-coder-480b-is-live-on-cerebras - Qwen3-Coder launch, $2/1M API rate, “20x higher coding speed” claim (fetched, HTTP 200).
https://www.cerebras.ai/code - current product page: GLM 4.7 at 1,000+ tok/s, Pro and Max both marked “sold out” (fetched, HTTP 200, as of 2026-09-26).
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44762959 - launch-day reception: 449 points, 172 comments, top comment flags missing caching (fetched, HTTP 200).
https://www.infoworld.com/article/4055909/ - critical review, Sep 15, 2025: disputed tok/s claims, TPM caps, 131k context, billing mixups, no vendor comment (fetched, HTTP 200).
https://www.infoworld.com/article/4075825/how-to-vibe-code-for-free-or-almost-free.html - follow-up: caps improved, Qwen3 deprecated for GLM-4.6, “fastest bar none” (fetched, HTTP 200).
https://www.reddit.com/r/LocalLLaMA/comments/1mfeazc/ - critical post, Aug 2, 2025: advertised 1,000 requests/day actually a 7.5M-token cap, “request” defined at ~8k tokens (retrieved, HTTP 200, via the Arctic Shift archive API).

Chutes

tom@tomrochette.com (Tom Rochette) — Sat, 26 Sep 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Chutes is a model-access platform built on Bittensor (subnet 64) that sells per-token inference on open-weight models, optional monthly plans, and private GPU deployments. Its per-token prices were the lowest I verified in this category, and price is the main reason to pick it.

What it is
#

Chutes serves open-weight models (Qwen, DeepSeek, Kimi, GLM, Mistral, Gemma) from hosted instances and charges by the million tokens, with no subscription required. Featured models run on confidential TEE compute, and billing accepts USD or TAO from a Bittensor wallet. A CLI can also deploy a private chute on self-serve GPU capacity billed per second, with a one-time deployment fee scaled to the GPU choice.

Status
#

Active and shipping changes as of September 2026, with a live pricing page, status page, and regular community announcements. 2026 was a repair year for the business model: on February 27 the team retired the free 200-requests-per-day Early Access perk, capped subscriptions at 5x pay-as-you-go value, and cut frontier models from the $3 Base tier after its tables showed top users extracting up to 324x their subscription price. A March 20 update reports tokens served down 45% over six weeks while revenue per million tokens rose 37.7% since February 1, after ending roughly 10B tokens/day of free-quota serving to about 11,000 users. I could not verify funding or traffic figures.

Strengths
#

Lowest per-token list prices I found this run, for example DeepSeek-V3.2 at $1.00/$1.00 per 1M in/out and Mistral-Nemo at $0.0245/$0.0978.
Many model families behind one OpenAI-compatible key, so switching models costs nothing.
Pay-as-you-go works with no plan attached, keeping commitment near zero.
TEE enclaves on featured models, a privacy posture most cheap providers lack.

Cautions
#

Terms changed three times in early 2026 (free tier removed, 5x cap, Base tier model cuts), so treat any quota as provisional.
InfoWorld’s reviewer found performance underwhelming, called the privacy policy ambiguous, and needed a VPN workaround to sign up.
The March 2026 update cites a global GPU shortage limiting inventory, so capacity depends on miner participation.
The 6%/10% plan discounts apply only beyond the bundled daily quota, so heavy users are pushed back to full PAYG rates.

Pricing
#

PAYG is the default as of 2026-09-26: GLM-5.2 $1.25 in / $3.95 out per 1M, Kimi-K3 $3.00/$15.00, Qwen3-235B-A22B-Thinking $0.2989/$1.1957, DeepSeek-V3.2 $1.00/$1.00. Plus costs $10/month for a bundled daily quota plus 6% off PAYG beyond it, and Pro costs $20/month for a larger quota plus 10% off. Since February 27, 2026, every subscription is capped at 5x the equivalent PAYG value, with overflow billing at standard PAYG. Private chutes run on an RTX Pro 6000 at $1.80/hour plus a $5.40 one-time deployment fee (3x the hourly rate).

Price history
#

Date	Plan	Change	Source
2025-07-31	Subscriptions	Pricing tiers announced, “coming next Monday” (live early August 2025)	Chutes news post, July 31, 2025
2026-02	Base / Plus / Pro	Baseline: $3 / $10 / $20 per month tiers existed	Feb 27, 2026 community announcement usage tables
2026-02-27	Early Access	Free 200-requests/day perk cut off from TEE models, fully retired March 15, 2026	same announcement
2026-02-27	All subscriptions	Value capped at 5x PAYG equivalent; GLM-5, Kimi K2.5, Qwen 3.5, MiniMax M2.5 removed from Base	same announcement
2026-09-26	Base	No longer listed on the pricing page, which shows only Plus $10, Pro $20, and Enterprise	chutes.ai/pricing

Compared to
#

- Cerebras Code sells raw speed on one coding model at $50/$200; choose it when latency dominates, Chutes when price dominates.
- GLM Coding Plan sells a large fixed quota on one model family; choose it if you will burn the quota, Chutes for variety without commitment.

Bottom line
#

Recommended for hobbyists and cost-driven developers who want many open models cheaply and can tolerate churn in terms and capacity. Not for teams needing SLAs, contractual stability, or closed frontier models. Claim to disagree with: after the 5x cap, Plus and Pro make little sense for coders, because PAYG with a small prepaid balance delivers the same upside without a recurring bill.

Changes
#

2026-09-26 - Created.

References
#

https://chutes.ai/pricing - current PAYG model rates, Plus $10 / Pro $20 with 6%/10% PAYG discounts, private GPU pricing (fetched, HTTP 200, as of 2026-09-26).
https://chutes.ai/news/community-announcement-february - February 27, 2026 changes: Early Access retirement, 5x subscription cap, Base tier model removals, abuse tables (fetched, HTTP 200).
https://chutes.ai/news/from-volume-to-value-building-a-sustainable-ai-inference-platform-2 - March 20, 2026 economics: tokens down 45%, revenue per token up 37.7%, free-tier costs (fetched, HTTP 200).
https://chutes.ai/news/coming-soon - July 31, 2025 post announcing the first pricing tiers (fetched, HTTP 200).
https://chutes.ai/docs/cli/deploy - private chute deployment mechanics and deployment fee structure (fetched, HTTP 200).
https://www.infoworld.com/article/4075825/how-to-vibe-code-for-free-or-almost-free.html - critical third-party review: underwhelming performance, ambiguous privacy policy, signup bugs; confirms the $3 entry tier in October 2025 (fetched, HTTP 200).

GLM Coding Plan

tom@tomrochette.com (Tom Rochette) — Sat, 26 Sep 2026 00:00:00 +0000

The GLM Coding Plan is Z.ai’s subscription that sells access to the GLM model family inside coding agents, currently $18/$80/$168 per month for Lite/Pro/Max. It is the cheapest quota-per-dollar coding subscription I verified, but a multiplier system governs the quota, so the sticker price is only the start of the math.

What it is
#

A credit-based subscription from Z.ai (Zhipu) for GLM-5.3 and GLM-5.3-Flash, consumed inside supported coding tools (Claude Code, Cline, OpenCode, Kilo Code, Cursor, Z.ai’s own ZCode, and others). You point the tool at Z.ai’s Anthropic- or OpenAI-compatible endpoints with a plan key, and requests to older GLM versions are auto-routed to 5.3. Plans bundle exclusive MCP servers (vision, web search, web reader, Zread). Usage outside officially supported tools is contractually prohibited, which makes this a walled-garden subscription rather than an API credit pack.

Status
#

Actively developed and restructured twice in a year: prompt-based plans at launch in 2025, then a credits-based system for new subscribers on July 30, 2026, with legacy plans grandfathered to the end of their billing cycle. The plan rode the GLM release cadence (GLM-4.5 in 2025, GLM-5.2 in June 2026, GLM-5.3 in August 2026), and tier prices rose at each step. Promotional quota mechanics (off-peak discounts, Flash campaigns) changed repeatedly through 2026, so published value figures have a short shelf life. I found no reliable subscriber counts.

Strengths
#

Quota per dollar is unmatched in this category: Z.ai itself documents quota worth approximately 15-30x the monthly fee at API rates.
Lite at $18, or $12.60 effective on yearly billing, undercuts every $20 rival I checked.
Off-peak usage (outside Mon-Fri 14:00-18:00 UTC+8) deducts credits at 50%, a standing discount for most time zones.
Hard-stop quota means spend is fixed: when quota runs out, calls pause and your account balance is never touched.

Cautions
#

Subscriptions are non-refundable once purchased, per the official FAQ.
The flagship model burns quota up to 3x faster at peak (a usage multiplier, not a price change), so effective throughput can be a third of the headline prompts.
Strict supported-tools-only terms and special endpoints block custom integrations.
Third-party reviewers report slow and unreliable periods under load, and prompts route through China-based infrastructure, a blocker for residency-bound teams.

Pricing
#

Current tiers as of 2026-09-26: Lite $18/month (per Z.ai docs), Pro $80 and Max $168 per August 2026 snapshots of the subscribe page, with 20% off quarterly and 30% off yearly billing (effective $12.60/$56/$117.60 per month). The July 2026 credits system allocates 2,000/10,000 credits per 5 hours/week on Lite, 12,000/60,000 on Pro, 28,000/140,000 on Max. Credits deduct per token type with multipliers (GLM-5.3: input 6.9, cached input 1.7, output 24, over 10,000), plus per-call charges for bundled MCP tools. Under the legacy prompts system, Z.ai documented quota as roughly 80/400/1,600 prompts per 5-hour window, with one prompt estimated at 15-20 model invocations.

Price history
#

Date	Plan	Change	Source
2025-09	Lite / Pro	Baseline: launched at $6/$30 per month with first-month promos of $3/$15	Cline blog, Sep 18, 2025
2026-06-18	Lite / Pro / Max	List prices $18/$72/$160, yearly effective $12.60/$50.40/$112	HyScaler
2026-07-30	All plans	Credits-based plans replace prompt-based plans for new subscribers	docs.z.ai usage-revision notice
2026-08-14	Lite / Pro / Max	Pro to $80 and Max to $168; 20% quarterly and 30% yearly discounts	emergent.sh

Compared to
#

- Cerebras Code sells speed at $50/$200; choose it when latency dominates, GLM when volume per dollar dominates.
- Chutes sells cheap pay-as-you-go across many model families; choose it for flexibility, GLM for a large fixed quota on one frontier family.
Z.ai’s own ZCode is the intended surface, but any supported harness works with the same quota.

Bottom line
#

Recommended for high-volume, human-in-the-loop coding where quota per dollar is the binding constraint and you can work off-peak. Not for long-horizon autonomous agent runs (aggregator tracking puts GLM-5.2 at about half of Claude Opus 4.8’s SWE-Marathon score), Claude-ecosystem power users, or residency-bound teams. Claim to disagree with: the rational entry is a single month of $18 Lite and never the discounted yearly plan, because the plan is non-refundable and its terms changed twice in a year.

Changes
#

2026-09-26 - Created.

References
#

https://docs.z.ai/devpack/overview - current credit allowances (2,000/12,000/28,000 per 5h), credit formula, off-peak 50% rule, “starting at 18 USD” (fetched, HTTP 200).
https://docs.z.ai/devpack/notice/usage-revision - July 30, 2026 credits transition; legacy 15-30x value claim and per-plan prompt ceilings (fetched, HTTP 200).
https://docs.z.ai/devpack/faq - non-refundable policy, supported-tools restriction, no balance deduction, quota reset cards (fetched, HTTP 200).
https://cline.bot/blog/zai-cline-3-dollar-ai-coding - launch-era pricing: $6/$30 with $3/$15 first-month promos, 120/600 prompts per 5 hours (fetched, HTTP 200, Sep 18, 2025).
https://hyscaler.com/insights/glm-coding-plan-review/ - June 2026 tiers at $18/$72/$160, 3x peak multiplier, competitive framing (fetched, HTTP 200).
https://www.digitalapplied.com/blog/glm-coding-plan-worth-it-2026-value-analysis - critical analysis, Jul 3, 2026: multiplier math, non-refundability, China residency, long-horizon benchmark gap (fetched, HTTP 200).
https://emergent.sh/learn/glm-5-3-pricing - August 2026 tiers at $18/$80/$168 with yearly equivalents; GLM-5.3 has no per-token API rate yet (fetched, HTTP 200).

Kimi Code

tom@tomrochette.com (Tom Rochette) — Sat, 26 Sep 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Kimi Code is Moonshot AI’s developer coding subscription, selling the K-series models through a CLI, desktop app, and VS Code extension under a membership quota. The same membership is sold at a yen ladder on kimi.com and a dollar ladder on kimi.ai, and the entry tiers do not convert between them.

What it is
#

Moonshot AI sells Kimi Code as the developer service inside a Kimi membership, with CLI, desktop, IDE, and third-party requests drawing on one shared quota. Third-party harnesses connect through OpenAI-compatible and Anthropic-compatible endpoints on api.kimi.com. Model access is tiered: K2.7 Code for every paying member, K3 at full 1M context from the mid tier up, with RMB-billed Extra Usage as overflow.

Status
#

Active and restructuring quickly: K3 shipped into Kimi Code on July 17, 2026, and by late September a restructure had renamed tiers and dropped the weekly quota window for new members. The CLI is published on GitHub under MoonshotAI, with third-party coverage putting it at 3.2k stars in July 2026. Independent guides multiplied through 2026, which I read as real adoption.

Strengths
#

The $19 entry ($15 billed annually) undercuts Claude Pro and Cursor Pro while including a 1M-context frontier-class model at the mid tier.
The yen ladder starts at ¥49 per month, well below the $19 international entry at any recent exchange rate.
Anthropic-compatible endpoints mean Claude Code and OpenCode work without new tooling.

Cautions
#

Coding quota shares one pool with chat, Deep Research, and other Kimi features, so non-coding usage drains your coding allowance.
The plan ladder moved twice in 2026, so quota rules at signup may not persist.
A February 2026 checkout experiment offered personalized first months between $0.99 and $11.99, so two subscribers on one tier can pay different prices.
One four-month user quit, reporting that higher tiers bought less inference per dollar, not more.

Pricing
#

On kimi.ai: Moderato $19, Allegretto $39, Allegro $99, Vivace $199 per month, annual effective $15/$31/$79/$159 (as of 2026-09-26). On kimi.com: Andante ¥49, Moderato ¥99, Allegretto ¥199, Allegro ¥699 per month (as of 2026-09-26). Under the new ladder, Go has no coding quota, Plus and above include Kimi Code, and Pro and above unlock K3 at 1M context. Extra Usage is pay-as-you-go overflow with a ¥25 minimum top-up, generally non-refundable.

Price history
#

Date	Plan	Change	Source
2026-07-17	Moderato to Vivace	Listed $19/$39/$99/$199 with time-limited promos at $15/$31/$79/$159; Kimi and Kimi Code separation announced	https://www.digitalapplied.com/blog/kimi-code-k3-hands-on-setup-plans-cache-2026
2026-09-26	Same tiers	Promos became standard annual pricing; new plans released at unchanged prices, weekly window dropped for new members	https://www.kimi.ai/help/membership/membership-pricing

Compared to
#

MiniMax Coding Plan (../minimax-coding-plan/index.md) meters tokens across modalities instead of time windows, cheaper at the top end but carrying 2026 billing-change baggage. NanoGPT (../nanogpt/index.md) fits when open-weight breadth matters more than one lab’s flagship. Claude Code or Cursor remain the picks when reliability per hour beats price per hour.

Bottom line
#

Recommended for cost-sensitive daily coders who want K3’s 1M context at $15 to $39 per month and accept quota churn. Not for teams needing contract-stable plan terms after two restructures in one year. I will claim something arguable: the ¥49 China-market ladder proves this product profits at roughly a third of the international price, which makes $19 a regional tax, not a cost.

Changes
#

2026-09-26 - Created.

References
#

https://www.kimi.com/code/en - official product page; surfaces and the K3 1M-context claim.
https://www.kimi.com/code/docs/en/kimi-code/membership.html - membership docs; new ladder (Go/Plus/Pro), weekly window removal, Extra Usage terms.
https://www.kimi.ai/help/membership/membership-pricing - dollar pricing $19/$39/$99/$199 monthly, $15/$31/$79/$159 annual, as of 2026-09-26.
https://www.kimi.com/en/help/membership/membership-pricing - yen pricing ¥49/¥99/¥199/¥699 and shared credit pool rules, as of 2026-09-26.
https://www.digitalapplied.com/blog/kimi-code-k3-hands-on-setup-plans-cache-2026 - July 17, 2026 snapshot of listed vs promo prices and the separation banner.
https://aihackers.net/value/deals/kimi-haggle/ - documented February 2026 first-month offers of $0.99 to $11.99, marked historical.
https://www.noemititarenco.com/blog/kimi-code-plan-after-4-months-of-use-honest-review/ - skeptical four-month user review and cancellation rationale.

MiniMax Coding Plan

tom@tomrochette.com (Tom Rochette) — Sat, 26 Sep 2026 00:00:00 +0000

The product sold as the MiniMax Coding Plan became the MiniMax Token Plan on June 1, 2026, a usage-based subscription on platform.minimax.io that meters the M-series models through a Subscription Key. MiniMax converted a liked flat coding plan into token billing overnight, without notice, and the resulting trust deficit is still the product’s largest liability.

What it is
#

MiniMax (a Hong Kong-listed Chinese AI lab) sells Plus, Max, and Ultra tiers, with quotas shared across text, image, and speech models including M3 and M2.7. Usage runs through a Subscription Key separate from the pay-as-you-go API key, and Anthropic-compatible endpoints let Claude Code-style harnesss plug in directly. Quota uses a 5-hour rolling window plus a weekly window, with no carryover. Credits packages at 1,000 per dollar cover overflow once subscription quota runs out.

Status
#

Active at company scale but turbulent: H1 2026 revenue hit $117M (up 283% year over year), ARR passed $800M by August, and July token consumption ran 20 times January’s. The stock fell more than 80% from its HK$1,330 peak to HK$298 by September 21, 2026, and JPMorgan downgraded it in June, citing M3’s lack of pricing power. The June 2 apology and compensation package followed developer complaints after the billing switch, with a refund portal on June 3.

Strengths
#

One token pool covers code, images, and speech, which suits mixed-agent workloads other coding plans exclude.
Credits overflow means a task does not hard-stop at the quota edge, it just starts spending Credits.
Even the top tier ($132) undercuts Western $200 plans by more than a third, on an open-weight model family.

Cautions
#

An open GitHub issue from June 3, 2026 documents quota draining with zero API calls and an unauditable cache discount, with Plus reportedly exhausted in 4-5 hours of agent work.
The FAQ states the plan does not support refunds and that MiniMax itself recommends pay-as-you-go for production.
Dynamic rate limiting tightens weekday peak hours (15:00-17:30), cutting Plus to roughly 3-4 concurrent agents.
Plus rose from $20 to $22 within three months of launch, an early sign that sticker prices here move fast.

Pricing
#

As of 2026-09-26: Plus $22/month, Max $55/month, Ultra $132/month, all with 5-hour rolling and weekly windows. Typical peak-hour capacity is 3-4 (Plus), 4-5 (Max), and 6-7 (Ultra) agents. Credits cost $5, $25, or $100 at 1,000 per dollar, valid 365 days, and a 10% referral discount applies at checkout.

Price history
#

Date	Plan	Change	Source
2026-06-01	Coding Plan -> Token Plan	Flat per-task Coding Plan replaced by usage-based Token Plan at the M3 launch, without advance notice	https://news.aibase.com/news/28699
2026-06-03	Token Plan Plus	Observed at $20/month, $200/year	https://github.com/MiniMax-AI/MiniMax-M2.7/issues/47
2026-09-26	Token Plan Plus/Max/Ultra	Listed at $22/$55/$132, with Plus up $2 against June	https://platform.minimax.io/docs/guides/pricing-token-plan

Compared to
#

Kimi Code (../kimi-code/index.md) sells time-windowed quota of one lab’s models and fits steady daily coders better than bursty multimodal users. NanoGPT (../nanogpt/index.md) has no quota windows at all, removing the mid-sprint lockout risk at the cost of per-token metering. MiniMax’s own pay-as-you-go API is the right choice for production, by the company’s own documentation.

Bottom line
#

Recommended for tinkerers who want cheap, broad token volume across modalities and will watch the usage bar. Not for anyone needing auditable billing, refunds, or production reliability. I will claim something arguable: until the quota denominator and per-call billing history are published, the usage bar is a trust position rather than a meter, and the June apology does not change that.

Changes
#

2026-09-26 - Created.

References
#

https://platform.minimax.io/docs/guides/pricing-token-plan - current tiers $22/$55/$132, quota windows, agent counts, Credits packages, as of 2026-09-26.
https://platform.minimax.io/docs/token-plan/faq - Subscription Key mechanics, no-refund policy, production guidance, peak-hour rate limiting.
https://github.com/MiniMax-AI/MiniMax-M2.7/issues/47 - critical billing-bug report: passive quota drain, unverifiable cache discount, $20 Plus in June 2026.
https://news.aibase.com/news/28699 - the June 2, 2026 apology, compensation package, and Coding Plan to Token Plan switch.
https://eu.36kr.com/en/p/3993817731234817 - critical business reporting: developer backlash, JPMorgan downgrade, market value collapse, H1 2026 financials.

Model access

tom@tomrochette.com (Tom Rochette) — Sat, 26 Sep 2026 00:00:00 +0000

The layer that sells access to models themselves: gateways and routers metering a percentage, vendor coding plans selling a quota, and flat subscriptions selling a ceiling. Editors and harnesses live in their own categories; this is where the token bill gets paid.

Cerebras Code - wafer-scale inference sold as speed, $50/$200 per month, currently sold out.
Chutes - decentralized inference with pay-as-you-go plus $10/$20 subscriptions capped at 5x pay-as-you-go value.
GLM Coding Plan - Z.AI’s flat monthly quota for the GLM line, from $18, restructured twice since launch.
Kimi Code - Moonshot’s membership ladder for coding, $19 to $199 monthly with Code from the second tier.
MiniMax Coding Plan - token-quota subscriptions for the MiniMax line, $22 to $132 per month, born from a silent plan replacement.
NanoGPT - the community aggregator: hundreds of routes pay-as-you-go plus a $12 open-weight subscription.
OpenCode Go - the OpenCode team’s $10/month open-model token pack, usable from any agent.
OpenCode Zen - the OpenCode team’s curated pay-per-use gateway over benchmarked endpoints.
OpenRouter - the largest model gateway, passthrough tokens plus a 5.5% credit fee, now joining Stripe.
Requesty - EU-residency gateway charging a flat 5% markup on upstream spend.
Synthetic - a flat $30/month subscription for open-weight coding LLMs aimed at agent users.

Its members are compared on shared rows in the Model Access Feature Matrix.

Changes
#

2026-09-26 - Added Cerebras Code.
2026-09-26 - Added Chutes.
2026-09-26 - Added GLM Coding Plan.
2026-09-26 - Added Kimi Code.
2026-09-26 - Added MiniMax Coding Plan.
2026-09-26 - Added NanoGPT.
2026-09-26 - Added OpenCode Go.
2026-09-26 - Added OpenCode Zen.
2026-09-26 - Added OpenRouter.
2026-09-26 - Added Requesty.
2026-09-26 - Added Synthetic.

Model Access Feature Matrix

tom@tomrochette.com (Tom Rochette) — Sat, 26 Sep 2026 00:00:00 +0000

This matrix compares the eleven model access providers in this category, the layer that sells you tokens rather than an editor or a harness.

The same token carries a toll from 0 to 8 percent or sits inside a flat monthly price, and the flat plans only win if your volume actually reaches their quotas.

Legend: ✓ yes, ✗ no, ~ partial, ? not verified. Every cell traces to the column’s research note, verified as of 2026-09-26; volatile cells carry their own dates.

The matrix
#

Feature	Cerebras Code	Chutes	GLM Coding Plan	Kimi Code	MiniMax Coding Plan	NanoGPT	OpenCode Go	OpenCode Zen	OpenRouter	Requesty	Synthetic
Kind	speed-first inference subscription	decentralized inference market with subscriptions	vendor coding plan (Z.AI)	vendor membership ladder (Moonshot)	vendor token plan	community aggregator plus subscription	token-pack subscription	curated pay-per-use gateway	passthrough gateway	governance gateway	flat open-model subscription
Billing mechanics	flat monthly with token-per-day caps	PAYG plus $10/$20 tiers adding quota and 6-10% off	flat monthly converted to credits, peak multipliers	monthly membership tiers over a shared quota pool	monthly token quotas in 5-hour and weekly windows	PAYG deposits plus a $12 open-weight subscription	$10/month for per-model dollar bundles	per-token, no markup claimed, card fees at cost	passthrough tokens, 5.5% credit fee ($0.80 minimum, Business 8%)	flat 5% of upstream spend	$30 pack or per-token
Cheapest paid entry	Pro $50/month (sold out 2026-09-26)	Plus $10/month (PAYG from cents)	Lite $18/month	Moderato $19/month ($15 annual)	Plus $22/month	Pro $12/month (PAYG from $0.10)	$10/month	$20 auto-reload, usage-priced	free tier, then the credit fee	free tier, then 5%	$30/month pack
Top tier	Max $200/month	Pro $20/month	Max $168/month	Vivace $199/month ($159 annual)	Ultra $132/month	the $12 Pro tier is the top	one $10/month tier	none, usage-based	Enterprise custom	Enterprise custom	stacked $30 packs
Models you can reach	fast Qwen and GLM coding lines	open weights (GLM-5.2, Kimi K3, Qwen, DeepSeek)	the GLM line	the Kimi line, K3 from Pro up	the MiniMax line	hundreds of routes, open weights included	open coding models only (Qwen, Grok, Luna lines)	open plus Claude, GPT, Gemini, and Grok lines	the largest catalog, frontier and open	600+ models	the open-weight always-on lineup
Limit or quota form	24M/120M tokens per day, TPM caps	daily quota, then discounted PAYG, capped at 5x value	credits per 5 hours and week, 3x peak burn on flagships	one shared pool across chat, research, and code	5-hour and weekly windows, dynamic peak limits	60M input tokens per week	per-model monthly dollars ($15-$60), 5-hour and weekly windows	balance only, auto-reload below $5	provider rate limits pass through	budget caps you set	500 requests per 5 hours per pack, 1 concurrent per model
The catch	sold out, and measured speed fell far short of the marketing	terms changed three times in early 2026, capacity rides on miners	non-refundable, peak burn cuts effective quota, China-based routing	quota shared with chat and Deep Research, ladder moved twice in 2026	quota drained with zero calls per a June 2026 issue, no refunds	the deal narrowed from $8 unlimited to $12 capped, opaque governance	no longer general API access, agent traffic only, monthly catalog churn	measured at more than 4x OpenRouter on identical open models	the fee punishes small top-ups, credits can expire within a year	the 5% grows with spend, hosted-only, 30-day default log retention	the 3x-Claude framing is contested, packs stack for parallelism, pinned models eventually 404
Frontier models	✗ open lines only	✗ open weights	✗ GLM only	✗ Kimi only	✗ MiniMax only	~ closed models on PAYG, open in the sub	✗ open models only	✓ Claude, GPT, Gemini, Grok	✓ nearly all	✓ 600+ including frontier	✗ open models only
Works from any agent	✓ API key	✓ OpenAI-compatible	~ supported tools only, special endpoints	~ first-party clients emphasized, API on higher tiers	✓ OpenAI-compatible	✓ OpenAI-compatible	✓ any agent, coding-agent headers required since 2026-09	✓ OpenAI/Anthropic/Google-compatible endpoints	✓ one key, any client	✓ one OpenAI-compatible endpoint	✓ OpenAI-compatible
Price trajectory	stable $50/$200 since 2025-08	free tier retired, Base tier cut	$6/$30 to $18/$80/$168 within a year	promos became standard pricing 2026-09	Plus $20 to $22 in three months, plan replaced overnight	$8 to $12 with a new cap	$5 promo removed, $15 flagship standard	baseline 2026-09-26, heavy deprecation churn	fee flattened to 5.5% (2025-06), Business 8% added (2026-09)	unchanged since tracking began (2026-09-26)	$20/$60 tiers replaced by a $30 pack

Reading the matrix
#

I read the billing-mechanics row first, because it decides who this provider is for: passthrough gateways meter reality, vendor plans sell a quota, and flat subscriptions sell a ceiling. The gateways (OpenRouter, Requesty, Zen) monetize a percentage, the vendor plans (GLM, Kimi, MiniMax) monetize commitment, and the community subs (NanoGPT, Synthetic, Chutes, Go) monetize the gap between list price and what self-hosted open models actually cost to serve. On price trajectories, only Requesty and Zen have not moved, and Zen’s baseline is one day old, so the stable-looking rows are the youngest ones. The frontier-models row is the real segmentation: if your loop needs Claude or GPT, the flat open-model subscriptions are irrelevant and the choice is gateway versus vendor subscription. The catches cluster into two kinds: mechanical limits you can engineer around (concurrency, windows, peak multipliers) and trust problems you cannot (quota draining, silent plan replacement, narrowed deals), and I weight the second kind higher.

Choosing an access provider
#

Default BYOK loop across many providers: OpenRouter for breadth, Requesty if EU residency or budget governance is required.
One vendor’s models all day: that vendor’s plan (GLM, Kimi, MiniMax), after checking the peak-hour mechanics against your working hours.
Open models at a flat ceiling: OpenCode Go or Synthetic for agent-shaped workloads, NanoGPT for breadth beyond coding, Chutes for the cheapest per-token open rates.
Frontier models without a subscription: OpenCode Zen, paying the measured curation premium only where a mis-served provider would silently degrade your agent.
Raw speed: Cerebras Code, when it is in stock and your context fits the window.

Changes
#

2026-09-26 - Created with eleven columns when the owner-directed Model access category was seeded.

References
#

https://opencode.ai/docs/go - Go subscription tiers, model limit table (fetched 200, 2026-09-26)
https://opencode.ai/docs/zen/ - Zen per-model price table and free models (fetched 200, 2026-09-26)
https://openrouter.ai/docs/faq - OpenRouter billing and routing FAQ (fetched 200, 2026-09-26)
https://requesty.ai/pricing - Requesty tier table and 5% markup quote (fetched 200, 2026-09-26)
https://nano-gpt.com/pricing - NanoGPT subscription and per-token prices (fetched 200, 2026-09-26)
https://platform.minimax.io/docs/guides/pricing-token-plan - MiniMax Token Plan tiers (fetched 200, 2026-09-26)
https://docs.z.ai/devpack/overview - GLM Coding Plan documentation (fetched 200, 2026-09-26)
https://chutes.ai/pricing - Chutes PAYG and subscription tiers (fetched 200, 2026-09-26)
https://synthetic.new/pricing - Synthetic subscription pack pricing (fetched 200, 2026-09-26)

NanoGPT

tom@tomrochette.com (Tom Rochette) — Sat, 26 Sep 2026 00:00:00 +0000

NanoGPT (nano-gpt.com) is an independent model-access gateway combining pay-per-token API access at list prices with a flat subscription that bundles open-weight model usage at no per-token cost. At $12 per month it is the cheapest flat-rate open-weight tier I can verify anywhere, but the deal quietly shrank over the past year.

What it is
#

The service runs a hosted web chat and an OpenAI-compatible API at provider list prices with no markup, taking deposits from $0.10 in crypto or $1 by card. The Pro subscription includes open-weight text and image models, currently framed as 60 million input tokens per week plus a 5% discount on eligible paid text models. Coverage spans text, image, video, 3D, audio, and embedding models under one balance. An independent operator runs it, and the pages I fetched name no corporate parent.

Status
#

Active: the blog published within the week of verification (September 22, 2026), ships monthly crypto-payment statistics, and added zero-data-retention routing on September 3, 2026. The Wayback Machine holds 57 captures from September 2024 through September 2026, so the service has operated continuously for at least two years. Its own Hacker News footprint is nearly nil: two stories in late 2024 with zero comments, while the NanoGPT name on HN belongs to Karpathy’s training repo (a 1,532-point story).

Strengths
#

List-price API with the exact cost printed on every request makes it a rare auditable gateway.
The subscription undercuts every first-party lab plan while covering text and image generation.
The privacy posture is concrete: crypto payments (Monero led deposits at 38.55% in August 2026), no-prompt-logging claims, and ZDR routing.

Cautions
#

The deal narrowed: September 2025 sold unlimited personal open-weight use at $8, September 2026 sells 60M input tokens per week at $12, a 50% rise with a new cap.
Bring-your-own-key requests are billed at 5% of normal model cost, and pinning a specific provider adds another 5%.
Governance is opaque: no funding, ownership, or company facts appear on fetched pages, so nobody is accountable if terms move again.
Scrutiny lives in Discord and niche communities rather than HN, so fewer independent eyes check the claims.

Pricing
#

Pro is $12/month as of 2026-09-26, including 60M input tokens per week, the 5% paid-text-model discount, and web plus API access. Pay-as-you-go needs no subscription: a free tier with one web-only model, list-price API billing, and $0.10 crypto or $1 card deposit minimums. In September 2025, Pro was $8/month with unlimited personal open-weight usage capped at 60,000 generations per month and 2,000 per day.

Price history
#

Date	Plan	Change	Source
2025-09-01	Pro	$8/month, unlimited personal open-weight usage (60,000 generations/month, 2,000/day)	http://web.archive.org/web/20250901063827/https://nano-gpt.com/subscription
2026-09-26	Pro	$12/month, 60M included input tokens per week, 5% paid-text-model discount	https://nano-gpt.com/pricing

Compared to
#

Kimi Code (../kimi-code/index.md) is the pick when you want one lab’s frontier open-weight models with quota predictability at a similar monthly price. MiniMax Coding Plan (../minimax-coding-plan/index.md) covers multimodal token volume cheaply but locks you out in 5-hour windows, which NanoGPT never does. The free PAYG path also makes NanoGPT the lowest-commitment way to test a model before any subscription.

Bottom line
#

Recommended for privacy-minded tinkerers and open-weight power users who want flat-cost breadth without quota-window lockouts. Not for engineers whose work needs closed frontier models at subscription quotas, since the $12 tier’s value lives almost entirely in open weights. I will claim something arguable: at $12 with open weights included, this beats any $15-$20 first-party plan on value, because open-weight quality has closed enough of the gap that the labs’ premium is now a convenience fee.

Changes
#

2026-09-26 - Created.

References
#

https://nano-gpt.com/pricing - current Pro pricing ($12/month, 60M input tokens/week), PAYG minimums, 5% BYOK and pinning fees, as of 2026-09-26.
http://web.archive.org/web/20250901063827/https://nano-gpt.com/subscription - September 2025 capture showing $8/month with unlimited personal open-weight usage.
https://nano-gpt.com/blog - activity evidence: September 2026 posts, ZDR routing, monthly crypto-payment statistics.
https://hn.algolia.com/api/v1/search?query=nano-gpt.com&restrictSearchableAttributes=url&tags=story&hitsPerPage=10 - the service’s thin HN footprint (two 0-comment stories, 2024).
https://hn.algolia.com/api/v1/search?query=NanoGPT&tags=story&hitsPerPage=10 - the name collision with Karpathy’s repo dominating HN results.

OpenCode Go

tom@tomrochette.com (Tom Rochette) — Sat, 26 Sep 2026 00:00:00 +0000

OpenCode Go is a $10/month subscription from the OpenCode (Anomaly) team that bundles access to a curated set of open coding models, usable from OpenCode or any compatible coding agent.

What it is
#

Go sells model access, not an editor or a harness. You subscribe, copy an API key, and point any agent at OpenAI-compatible, Anthropic-compatible, or Responses endpoints under opencode.ai/zen/go/v1. The lineup is 32 open-weight coding models as of 2026-09-26 (Grok 4.7/4.6, GLM-5.3 family, Kimi K3, Qwen3.x, DeepSeek V4, MiniMax M3, MiMo, GPT 6 Luna), and only one member per workspace can hold a subscription.

Status
#

Active and changing fast. The OpenCode repo shows about 208K GitHub stars as of 2026-09-26, the Go docs were last updated 2026-09-25, and the plan has grown from a three-model Beta in March 2026 to 32 models. Churn is constant: GPT 6 Luna arrived 2026-09-22 and Space Bunny Free appeared as a limited-time unlimited model. Go converts $10 into up to $60 of metered usage per month, and that 6x ratio is the entire value proposition.

Strengths
#

The $60 monthly usage value costs $10, up to 6x leverage if you max it.
Models are benchmarked for agentic coding before inclusion, per the team.
Works with any agent; Claude Code, Codex, Pi, jcode, and Kilo Code CLI are validated clients.
Dollar-denominated windows make the bill predictable, free models stay available after limits, and “Use balance” falls back to your Zen balance instead of hard-stopping requests.
Most models run with zero retention and no training on your data.

Cautions
#

This is no longer general API access.
Since September 2026, clients must send coding-agent traffic, a real user agent, and an x-opencode-session header, which the community reads as whitelisting non-agent use.
Limits are dollar-value, so flagship tiers (Grok, Kimi K3, GLM-5.3, GPT 6 Luna) include only $15/month, with a $3 5-hour window.
The catalog and limits change monthly, the $5 first-month promo is gone, and usage estimates assume heavy prompt caching, so your real request counts will not match.
Muse Spark Contributor models train on your prompts and are region-limited.

Pricing
#

$10/month, cancel any time, as of 2026-09-26. Each model carries a monthly dollar limit (mostly $60, some $30, $15 for flagships), with windows at 20% per rolling 5 hours (so $12 on a $60 model) and 50% weekly ($30). Exceeded limits fall back to free models, or to your Zen balance if you enable it. Top-ups draw on the shared Zen balance, where card fees are passed at cost (4.4% + $0.30).

Price history
#

Date	Plan	Change	Source
2026-03-12	Go (Beta)	Baseline: $10/month, three models (GLM-5, Kimi K2.5, MiniMax M2.5), $60 usage value	https://help.apiyi.com/en/opencode-go-subscription-worth-it-review-en.html
2026-08-24	Go	First-month $5 promo removed, flat $10/month	https://codingplan.org/en/plans/opencode-go
2026-09-02	Go	$15 monthly limit became the standard for several flagship models (community-reported)	https://www.reddit.com/r/opencode/comments/1vo9j8l/opencode_go_15_is_now_the_standard/
2026-09-24	GLM-5.3-Flash	Monthly limit doubled to $60 (docs confirm $60 by 2026-09-25)	https://www.reddit.com/r/opencode/comments/1wc1cwe/glm_53_flash_now_gets_twice_the_limits_on/

Compared to
#

OpenCode Zen (../opencode-zen/index.md) is the sibling pay-per-use gateway: no subscription, huge catalog including Claude and GPT, but per-token prices that can exceed OpenRouter’s. Choose Go when you want a capped, predictable bill for open models. OpenRouter (../openrouter/index.md) has hundreds of models with routing and fallback at passthrough prices plus a 5.5% credit fee; choose it when you need frontier or long-tail models Go does not carry. Direct DeepSeek API beats Go unless you fully use the $60 cap, per a community breakdown that pegs Go at 33% cheaper only at full usage.

Bottom line
#

Recommended for heavy users of open coding models who will actually burn the $60 monthly value. Not for anyone needing general-purpose API access, closed frontier models, or light usage. My disagreeable claim: at roughly 50% usage Go is about break-even with direct API pricing, so most subscribers are partly paying for slack they never consume.

Changes
#

2026-09-26 - Created.

References
#

https://opencode.ai/go - product page, $10/month framing, model snapshot, GitHub star count (200).
https://opencode.ai/docs/go - full model/limit table, 20%/50%/100% windows, validated clients, header requirements (200).
https://codingplan.org/en/plans/opencode-go - $5 first-month promo removal on 2026-08-24, catalog churn timeline (200).
https://help.apiyi.com/en/opencode-go-subscription-worth-it-review-en.html - March 2026 Beta state, dollar-window mechanics, critical take (200).
https://www.reddit.com/r/opencode/comments/1w9pyvq/opencode_go_is_no_longer_general_api_access/ - community reaction to session-header requirement (direct fetch 403; content read via search).
https://www.reddit.com/r/opencodeCLI/comments/1tqx9u1/why_opencode_gos_deepseek_v4_pro_is_33_cheaper/ - full-usage price math vs DeepSeek API (content read via search).

OpenCode Zen

tom@tomrochette.com (Tom Rochette) — Sat, 26 Sep 2026 00:00:00 +0000

OpenCode Zen is the OpenCode (Anomaly) team’s curated pay-per-use AI gateway, one API key over a tested catalog that spans open models and the Claude, GPT, Gemini, and Grok lines.

What it is
#

Zen is a billing and routing gateway, not a model: you add credits, get a key, and call OpenAI-compatible, Anthropic-compatible, Google, or Responses endpoints under opencode.ai/zen/v1. The team benchmarks each model/provider pair and serves what passes, their answer to getting a degraded version of a model through a generic router. It also sells to teams (workspaces, roles, member spending caps, model toggles, BYOK for OpenAI and Anthropic keys), and free stealth and promo models rotate through the catalog.

Status
#

Active, with heavy catalog churn managed through a public deprecation table (docs updated 2026-09-25), and workspaces free during the beta with team pricing unannounced. The Reddit thread “Opencode Zen is astoundingly more expensive than OpenRouter” (July 2026) is the sharpest public criticism and remains the note’s key stress test. Zen sells curation and reliability, and community measurements say that premium can exceed 4x the cheapest gateway on identical models.

Strengths
#

Every endpoint is benchmarked for coding-agent use, so you avoid badly served providers.
A stable of free models (Big Pickle, Space Bunny Free, MiMo Free, Nemotron Free) with documented data caveats.
Markups are claimed to be zero beyond pass-through processing fees (4.4% + $0.30 per card transaction).
US-hosted with zero-retention on most models, exceptions listed per model.
Same balance backs the Go subscription’s overflow, and the key works from any agent.

Cautions
#

A July 2026 community test measured Zen at more than 4x OpenRouter on Kimi K2.6 and MiniMax M2.7.
The gap persists per model as of 2026-09-26: Zen lists GLM-5.3-Flash at $0.15/$0.50 per 1M tokens while OpenRouter’s catalog shows about $0.05/$0.14.
Auto-reload adds $20 whenever your balance drops below $5, which can overrun a monthly budget you set.
Deprecated models vanish on published dates, so configs need migrations, and free stealth models may use your data to improve the model during their free window.

Pricing
#

Pay-as-you-go per 1M tokens, as of 2026-09-26: GLM-5.3 $1.40/$4.40, GLM-5.3-Flash $0.15/$0.50, Kimi K3 $3/$15, Qwen3.7 Plus $0.40/$1.60, DeepSeek V4.1 Flash $0.30/$1.20, MiniMax M3 $0.30/$1.20. Frontier lines: Claude Sonnet 5 $2/$10, Claude Opus 5.5 $4/$20, GPT 5.5 $5/$30, Gemini 3.8 Flash $1.50/$7.50, Grok 4.7 $2/$6. Jev 1.13 charges $0.042 per input with free output, and nine models are free including the Big Pickle and Space Bunny stealth models, all for a limited time. Auto-reload charges $20 when the balance falls below $5, and OpenCode itself uses low-cost models to generate session titles on your bill.

Price history
#

Date	Plan	Change	Source
2026-09-26	Pay-per-use catalog	Baseline: per-model rates as published (GLM-5.3 $1.40/$4.40, Kimi K3 $3/$15, Jev 1.13 $0.042 in)	https://opencode.ai/docs/zen/

Compared to
#

OpenCode Go (../opencode-go/index.md) is the sibling subscription: $10/month for capped open-model usage, no frontier models, same balance; choose it when you want a ceiling. OpenRouter (../openrouter/index.md) is the breadth play: hundreds of models, passthrough pricing, 5.5% credit fee; choose it when price per token on open models matters more than curation. Holding your own provider keys is cheapest for a single provider, and Zen’s BYOK only covers OpenAI and Anthropic.

Bottom line
#

Recommended for OpenCode-centric developers who want vetted endpoints, free models to fall back on, and US-hosted zero-retention. Not for price-sensitive, high-volume runs on open models, where OpenRouter wins on raw per-token cost. My disagreeable claim: the curation premium is worth paying only when a mis-served provider would silently degrade your agent, and most coding work is not that sensitive.

Changes
#

2026-09-26 - Created.

References
#

https://opencode.ai/docs/zen/ - per-model price table, free models, auto-reload, deprecations, privacy (200).
https://docs.docker.com/ai/docker-agent/providers/opencode-zen/ - third-party integration doc, Zen vs Go billing table (200).
https://www.reddit.com/r/opencodeCLI/comments/1syog9v/opencode_zen_is_astoundingly_more_expensive_than/ - critical 4x price claim vs OpenRouter (direct fetch 403; content read via search).
https://costgoat.com/pricing/openrouter/ - OpenRouter per-model prices used for the GLM-5.3-Flash comparison (200, as of 2026-09-25).
https://opencode.ai/docs/go - shared balance and “Use balance” fallback mechanics (200).
https://www.truefoundry.com/blog/openrouter-pricing - OpenRouter fee structure used as the price counterpoint (200).

OpenRouter

tom@tomrochette.com (Tom Rochette) — Sat, 26 Sep 2026 00:00:00 +0000

OpenRouter is the largest multi-provider LLM gateway, one API key and one prepaid credit balance across hundreds of models from dozens of providers, with automatic routing and fallback.

What it is
#

A marketplace gateway founded in early 2023 by Alex Atallah (OpenSea co-founder). Provider token prices pass through unchanged; you fund prepaid credits and OpenRouter takes a fee on the purchase, not on inference. Routing variants (:nitro for speed, :floor for price, :exacto for tool-calling quality, :free and :batch) change how requests are placed, and BYOK keeps your own provider keys behind OpenRouter’s routing, analytics, and fallbacks.

Status
#

The scale is venture-grade: $113M Series B led by Alphabet’s CapitalG at about $1.3B post-money in May 2026, with 8M users and roughly 100 trillion tokens per month. Annualized inference spend through the platform grew from $10M (October 2024) to over $100M (May 2025), per a tracked pricing blueprint. On 2026-08-19 OpenRouter announced it is joining Stripe, with closing expected within weeks of the announcement; the post commits to the same product, name, roadmap, and provider-neutral routing, and states the platform now processes 10+ trillion tokens per day across 400+ models for more than 10 million developers. The pricing page was rebuilt on 2026-09-20 into four tiers (Free, Standard, Business, Enterprise), and the pricing page itself renders client-side, so my fetch returned navigation only.

Strengths
#

Passthrough pricing is real: verified spot checks (Claude Opus 5 at $5/$25) match provider list prices.
One key, one balance, automatic provider fallback, per-model price/latency comparison, and a fee structure published in full.
Free tier is a genuine on-ramp: 25+ free models, 1,000 requests/day after a one-time $10 credit purchase.
BYOK is free through $25,000/month of list-price inference, which covers most teams entirely.
The Business tier makes EU-only or US-only routing self-serve instead of an Enterprise contract.

Cautions
#

The 5.5% credit fee with a $0.80 minimum punishes small top-ups: a $5 purchase costs 16% in fees.
BYOK’s free allowance is metered at OpenRouter list price, not your negotiated rate, so discounts do not slow the meter.
Paid-tier rate limits are passthrough from providers, and 429s arrive without queueing or backoff; your client owns retries.
No public SLA below Enterprise.
Routing can silently move you to a different provider, and a provider price change flows straight to your bill.
Credits may expire after one year per the terms.

Pricing
#

Free: $0, 25+ free models, 20 requests/minute, 50 requests/day (1,000/day with $10 lifetime credits), workspace limit 5. Standard: 5.5% fee per credit purchase, $0.80 minimum, crypto 5.0% flat, no subscription, workspace limit 5. Business: 8% fee, inference locked to EU or US providers with no cross-region fallback, workspace limit 1,000 (launched 2026-09-07). Enterprise: custom, volume commitments, SSO/SAML, contractual SLAs, $200,000/month free BYOK allowance. BYOK: 5% of equivalent cost above the free allowance, as of 2026-09-26.

Price history
#

Date	Plan	Change	Source
2023-05	Launch	Baseline: passthrough tokens, prepaid credits, purchase fee	https://www.usagepricing.com/blueprint/openrouter
2025-06-09	Credit fee	Flattened to 5.5% with $0.80 minimum; crypto to 5.0% flat	https://www.usagepricing.com/blueprint/openrouter
2026-07-14	BYOK	Free allowance re-based from 1M/5M requests to $25,000/$200,000 of list-price inference	https://www.usagepricing.com/blueprint/openrouter
2026-09-07	Business	New self-serve tier at 8% fee for EU/US-only routing	https://www.usagepricing.com/blueprint/openrouter
2026-09-20	Table	Pay-as-you-go renamed Standard; workspace limits published (5/5/1000/Custom)	https://www.usagepricing.com/blueprint/openrouter

Compared to
#

OpenCode Go (../opencode-go/index.md) is a $10 subscription for open coding models with hard caps; choose OpenRouter when your usage is spiky or you need frontier models. OpenCode Zen (../opencode-zen/index.md) is the curated coding gateway, usually pricier per token on open models; choose Zen when benchmarked endpoints and free stealth models matter more than unit cost. Direct provider accounts are cheapest for one dominant model at scale, at the cost of N billing relationships and no cross-provider fallback.

Bottom line
#

Recommended for multi-model teams and tinkerers who value breadth, fallback, and one bill. Not for single-provider, high-volume workloads with negotiated rates, where the fee is pure overhead. My disagreeable claim: I would pay the 5.5% rather than run the same multi-provider setup myself, because the fee buys uptime pooling, not just convenience.

Changes
#

2026-09-26 - Created.

References
#

https://openrouter.ai/docs/faq - official fee statement (5.5%, $0.80 minimum, crypto 5%), BYOK dollar thresholds, no-markup position, free-tier limits (200).
https://openrouter.ai/pricing - tier names and fee rows (200, JS-rendered shell; content corroborated via the sources below).
https://www.usagepricing.com/blueprint/openrouter - funding history, tier timeline, workspace limits, dated pricing changes (200, facts checked 2026-09-24).
https://openrouter.ai/blog/announcements/openrouter-is-joining-stripe/ - the joining-Stripe announcement, 2026-08-19: continuity commitments, 10+ trillion tokens per day, 400+ models, 10M+ developers (fetched 200, 2026-09-26).
https://ofox.ai/blog/openrouter-pricing-hidden-markup-breakdown-2026/ - independent fee-stack verification, $0.80-minimum math, BYOK metering change (200).
https://www.truefoundry.com/blog/openrouter-pricing - critical framing: fee at scale, BYOK, missing SLA (200, published 2026-08-25).
https://costgoat.com/pricing/openrouter/ - per-model price snapshots used for cross-gateway comparison (200, as of 2026-09-25).

Requesty

tom@tomrochette.com (Tom Rochette) — Sat, 26 Sep 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Requesty is an EU-hosted managed AI gateway that puts 600+ models behind one OpenAI-compatible endpoint and charges a flat 5% markup on upstream model spend.

The 5% markup is the whole business model: keep your OpenAI SDK code, point the base URL at router.requesty.ai/v1, and pay model cost plus 5% for routing, caching, and governance.

What it is
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I read it as pass-through billing with a gateway attached: hosted-only, no subscription tiers, no seat fees, no minimum spend. You get routing policies, fallback chains, semantic caching, budget caps, PII detection, and an MCP gateway over one key. Their own comparison post says the gateway is built in Rust, and EU residency in Frankfurt is central to their positioning.

Status
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Alive and funded: a $3M seed led by 20VC was announced 2025-09-26, with Tapestry VC, Insiders Ventures, and Tiny Supercomputer, and Business Insider covered the pitch deck.
The site footer reads © 2026 Requesty Ltd and their blog shipped multiple gateway comparisons through June and September 2026, yet an hn.algolia.com search for “requesty.ai” returns no story about the company, so their footprint is SEO and docs, not Hacker News.

Strengths
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Pricing is one line long: a $10/1M token model costs $10.50 through them, and the free tier gives 200 requests/day on free models with no credit card.
EU (Frankfurt) data residency is included on every plan.
Enterprise adds SSO, RBAC, audit logs, guardrails, and service accounts for CI/CD.

Cautions
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The 5% scales with your spend, so the fee grows exactly when your usage does, unlike flat-priced access.
A competitor-authored guide (TrueFoundry, which sells a rival gateway) notes Requesty is hosted-only with no self-hosting, had SOC 2 Type II still in progress (expected Q3 2026), and keeps self-service prompt logging on for up to 30 days by default, with organization-wide zero retention available only on written request.
Their own properties disagree on catalog size: 600+ on the pricing page versus 400+ in their June 2026 comparison.
The “caching makes us net-negative on cost” claim (40-60% hit rates) is vendor math I could not verify independently.

Pricing
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Free: $0, free models only, 200 requests/day, routing, caching, spend tracking, and EU residency included.
Pay as you go: flat 5% markup on upstream model cost, all 600+ models, budget caps, and MCP gateway, with BYOK carrying 0% markup per their docs (as of 2026-09-26).
Enterprise: custom, with SSO (Okta, Azure AD, Google Workspace, custom OIDC), RBAC, approved-model policies, and custom SLAs.

Price history
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Date	Plan	Change	Source
2026-09-26	Pay as you go	Baseline: flat 5% markup on upstream spend, free tier at 200 requests/day	requesty.ai/pricing

Compared to
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OpenRouter: a 5.5% fee on credit purchases plus a $0.80 minimum and 365-day credit expiry per Requesty’s own comparison; pick OpenRouter for catalog breadth and instant start, Requesty for governance and EU residency.
LiteLLM: a free self-hosted proxy with zero markup; pick it if you have DevOps capacity and want no vendor in the billing path.
Synthetic (Synthetic): a flat subscription for open-weight coding models, not a general gateway; pick it for agent coding at a fixed monthly cost.

Bottom line
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Recommended for teams routing production multi-provider traffic who want EU residency, budget governance, and a bill finance can read as a percentage. Not for solo developers who only want cheap model access, or anyone who needs self-hosting. My most contestable claim: without repetitive traffic that actually hits the cache, you are just paying 5% for a proxy.

Changes
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2026-09-26 - Created.

References
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https://requesty.ai/pricing - 5% markup quote, tier table, 200 requests/day free tier, EU residency (as of 2026-09-26)
https://www.requesty.ai/blog/requesty-raises-3m - $3M seed led by 20VC, investor list, EU positioning (published 2025-09-26)
https://www.requesty.ai/blog/best-llm-routing-platforms-compared-2026-requesty-portkey-litellm-openrouter - their own marketing comparison; Rust, 8ms P50 claim, OpenRouter’s 5.5% credit fee (published 2026-06-23)
https://www.truefoundry.com/blog/requesty-ai-pricing - competitor-authored critical guide; BYOK 0%, 30-day prompt retention, SOC 2 in progress (published 2026-09-11)
https://hn.algolia.com/api/v1/search?query=requesty.ai&tags=story - no meaningful Hacker News footprint found (queried 2026-09-26)

Synthetic

tom@tomrochette.com (Tom Rochette) — Sat, 26 Sep 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Synthetic (synthetic.new) sells flat monthly subscriptions and pay-per-token billing for open-weight LLMs served on its own US and EU infrastructure, aimed squarely at coding-agent users.

It is the closest thing to Claude Pro for open-weight models: $30/month for 500 requests per 5 hours across models like DeepSeek-V4.1-Flash, GLM-5.3-Flash, and Kimi-K3, with prompts never stored longer than 14 days.

What it is
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A privacy-focused inference provider that runs open-weight models itself rather than reselling closed APIs, with “always-on” models included in subscriptions and usage-based billing for enterprise and on-demand needs. Any OpenAI-compatible tool works against api.synthetic.new/v1 (Anthropic-compatible /messages endpoints exist too), and OpenCode ships Synthetic as a native provider you select with /connect.

Status
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Launched via Show HN on 2025-08-28 (31 points, 21 comments), with the founder answering questions in-thread.
By September 2025 third parties described it as 19 always-on models for $20-60/month; as of 2026-09-26 the site markets a single $30/month pack plus usage-based billing.
Distribution is real, with OpenCode, Kilo Code, Crush, Claude Code, GitHub Copilot, and OpenClaw all listed in its docs, and its marketing has also gotten visible enough to attract pushback, including one 2026 Reddit thread warning users away and another accusing its community of astroturfing.

Strengths
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Flat cost with forgiving metering: requests are counted per API call, so a parallel tool-call batch is one request, per the founder on HN.
Privacy is specific rather than vibes: API prompts and completions cannot be stored longer than 14 days and only for debugging, and Kilo’s docs confirm no training on your data.
syn: aliases (syn:large:text) auto-route to the latest recommended model, protecting you from pinning names that later 404.

Cautions
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A 2026 r/opencodeCLI thread titled “Stay away from synthetic.new” reports the 3x-Claude-limits framing did not hold in practice, with limits hitting much sooner than expected, possibly from inefficient tool calling in the Chinese open models.
One pack allows only 1 concurrent request per model; you must buy more packs to raise parallelism, which matters for multi-agent setups.
Model rotation is a documented risk: their own docs warn that pinned model names will eventually 404.
An r/kimi thread from mid-2026 accuses Synthetic community moderators of coordinated affiliate-link promotion; I cannot verify the accusation, so I treat surrounding hype with care.

Pricing
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Subscription pack: $30/month ($1/day) for 500 requests per 5 hours, advertised as 3x the rate limits of Claude’s $20/month plan, with 1 concurrent request per model and UI plus API access (as of 2026-09-26).
Usage-based: pay-per-token on always-on models and pay-per-minute on-demand, pitched at enterprise.
All always-on models plus embeddings are included in every subscription, and embeddings do not count against the rate limit.

Price history
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Date	Plan	Change	Source
2025-10-08	Standard	$20/month, 135 messages per 5 hours	Wayback capture of synthetic.new/pricing
2025-10-08	Pro	$60/month, 1,350 messages per 5 hours	Wayback capture of synthetic.new/pricing
2026-09-26	Pack (x1)	$30/month ($1/day), 500 requests per 5 hours, 1 concurrent request per model; the exact date the $20/$60 tiers ended is not in my sources	synthetic.new/pricing

Compared to
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Requesty (../requesty/index.md): a general gateway metered at 5% of spend; pick Synthetic when you want a fixed bill and open-weight models only.
Claude Pro / Claude Code: 1.5x the price ($30 vs $20) for closed frontier models; pick Claude for peak quality, Synthetic for privacy and flat cost.
Direct open-model hosts (DeepSeek, Z.ai): pay per token and often cheaper at low volume; Synthetic wins when agent request volume would blow past token budgets.

Bottom line
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Recommended for OpenCode or Kilo users who hit rate limits daily, want a predictable $30/month, and prefer prompts not retained beyond 14 days. Not for anyone needing frontier closed models, guaranteed capacity, or high concurrency on a single pack. My most contestable claim: the “3x Claude limits” line is the weakest reason to buy, because the most detailed public user report says real-world limits feel closer to Claude’s than the marketing implies.

Changes
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2026-09-26 - Created.

References
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https://synthetic.new/pricing - current $30/month pack, 500 requests/5hr, 1 concurrent request per model, usage-based option (as of 2026-09-26; JS-rendered page, text extracted from fetched HTML)
https://web.archive.org/web/20251008095830id_/https://synthetic.new/pricing - October 2025 pricing: Standard $20/135 messages per 5h, Pro $60/1,350
https://hn.algolia.com/api/v1/items/45055763 - Show HN launch thread; founder on request counting, 14-day retention, and GLM-4.5 as flagship (2025-08-28)
https://dev.synthetic.new/docs/api/models - current always-on model list, syn: aliases, model-rotation warning (as of 2026-09-26)
https://dev.synthetic.new/docs/guides/opencode - native OpenCode provider setup
https://kilo.ai/docs/ai-providers/synthetic - Kilo integration, no-training and 14-day auto-delete privacy claims
https://www.reddit.com/r/opencodeCLI/comments/1rfdadw/stay_away_from_syntheticnew/ - critical user report on real-world limits; direct fetch returned 403, content recovered via search-result extraction

model-access on tomrochette.com

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