You buy credits on OpenRouter, or rather you load money onto your account and then as you make API calls your account balance is deducted by the cost displayed on OpenRouter's website (market rates).
So once money is loaded on your account you pay the same as if you used the LLM provider directly but you pay a premium to load money onto your account, it's effectively adding a 5% fee to the base LLM API prices (and $0.35/per reload, depending on reload amount this might be negligible but on a $10 reload it means you are effectively paying a 9% fee).
alt Hacker News
You buy credits on OpenRouter, or rather you load money onto your account and then as you make API calls your account balance is deducted by the cost displayed on OpenRouter's website (market rates).
So once money is loaded on your account you pay the same as if you used the LLM provider directly but you pay a premium to load money onto your account, it's effectively adding a 5% fee to the base LLM API prices (and $0.35/per reload, depending on reload amount this might be negligible but on a $10 reload it means you are effectively paying a 9% fee).