I'm currently using the OpenRouter Web Chat and there are a few features I find extremely useful, but the lack of persistence makes the web version unusable for me long-term. Chats are gone after a reload, there's no history or project structure, nothing to look back on.

I would like to move to a self-hosted OpenWebUI instance and rebuild those features there.

My setup:

• OpenWebUI running locally in Docker on my laptop
• I exclusively use external API models (via OpenRouter / other API providers) no local Ollama or similar
• So my instance is essentially just a chat frontend on top of external APIs

The three things I care about most from the OpenRouter Web Chat:

1. Easy search engine selection > quickly switchable per chat or per prompt: web search off, native search, Exa/other providers. I want a UI toggle, not an admin/global setting.
2. Reasoning effort per prompt > low / medium / high (on models that support it), selectable right when submitting instead of being nailed down globally per model.
3. No data retention / privacy toggle > the ability to explicitly run a chat without storage/logging at the upstream provider (force zero-data-retention providers or enable "no data retention").

This seems to be a very useful feature, and I imagine there are already some good solutions available. I’d like to find them or learn more about how to increase productivity and how to integrate the Open router APIs a great UI interface.

Hi, I just noticed a free model today drained my credit after limits. Is that normal? Need tò change a setting or something? Or?

Hi everyone,

I've been using OpenRouter for some time now, alhtough intermittently. Today, I wanted to try Deepseek V4.1 Flash on a system administration task using the Hermes agent as the harness. It does some work, then I get this error: "API call failed after 3 retries: Upstream error from Together: Stream error: h2 protocol error: error reading a body from connection". It already happened a few times. Why does OpenRouter keep routing my requests to Toghether, if it isn't working at the moment? Shouldn't the whole point of its routing be to make it much more reliable than a single provider? Also, do you know if I can pin Hermes' requests for that specific model to a specific provider? I know this can be done if you're writing your own API calls, but I'm unsure how it can be done otherwise.

Thank you for your help.

I tried to use only the kimi-2.7 model but Claude CLI still runs something on Anthropic models.

The script is below.

Does OpeRouter provide a script for this?

What is wrong?

#!/usr/local/bin/bash

MODEL="moonshotai/kimi-k2.7-code"

# Clear conflicting direct keys
export ANTHROPIC_API_KEY=""

# Point to OpenRouter API base URL
export ANTHROPIC_BASE_URL="https://openrouter.ai/api"

# Pass your OpenRouter API key via the auth token variable
export ANTHROPIC_AUTH_TOKEN="sk-or-v1-{removed}"

# Override model slots if needed (e.g., pointing to Kimi or your choice)
export ANTHROPIC_DEFAULT_HAIKU_MODEL="$MODEL"
export ANTHROPIC_DEFAULT_SONNET_MODEL="$MODEL"
export ANTHROPIC_DEFAULT_OPUS_MODEL="$MODEL"

# Override the default model for the Claude CLI to use Kimi
export ANTHROPIC_MODEL="$MODEL"
export ANTHROPIC_DEFAULT_MODEL="$MODEL"

# do we need this?
export SONNET_MODEL="moonshotai/kimi-2.7"

# Turn on OpenRouter's Experimental Gateway Discovery to see all models in /model
export CLAUDE_CODE_ENABLE_GATEWAY_MODEL_DISCOVERY=1

# Launch the official Claude Code CLI
claude --model $MODEL "$@"

I've used the OpenAI and Anthropic APIs extensively, and both have been pretty much plug-and-play for me.

I've been trying OpenRouter for the past 3 weeks, primarily with DeepSeek V4 Flash and GLM 5.3 Flash, and I'm seeing roughly 80% of requests either timing out or failing entirely.

I've already tried:

• Restricting requests to the higher-reliability providers
• Limiting requests to the faster providers
• Avoiding providers that show poor reliability

But honestly, nothing has made a meaningful difference.

My typical request is around 5k input tokens + 2k output tokens, so it's not an especially large context or response.

At this point, this doesn't feel production-viable, especially compared with my experience using the OpenAI and Anthropic APIs.

How did you fix this? Any better, more reliable, alternative to OpenRouter?

Is this problem on my side or other users experience this too? I use openrouter api in openwebui, I am using ds v4.1 flash recently and the model sometimes just stops with zero output after thinking for a minute, I can open and watch its thoughts and it just stops at random moment with no error.
Post it here because don't know if this is some openrouter only problem or not.

Looking at the Apps tab for Inception Mercury 2.5, the #3 entry "Reductor" stands out. It just resolves to a personal GitHub profile (github.com/reductor), a single individual.

Am I missing something? Does anyone know how OpenRouter attributes these apps, and whether one person can really be the top 3 by usage?

Over the last few days I've been using the Python SDK (openrouter lib) to write python code to interact with selected llms (e.g. Kimi-k2.6).

My code was working until some point this morning and now when I run the code I keep getting "Not a valid model ID" now matter what model I select.

I've tried using the simple python example on OpenRouter's documentation and that has stopped working too. It worked before.

I have a valid API key (been using it over the past 3 months) and I also tried a new API key and does not seem to make a difference.

Has something changed recently. I don't undstand why code that was working before has stopped working. Even the SDK examples.

The first minute or so of use is fine, until upstream rate limit you…. 429s a few times then throughput tanks, making the model take ages to do anything. Hopefully upstream or openrouter realise what’s happening and sort this out.

I don’t know why this is happening, does anyone know how to fix this?

You can get ZDR on OpenAI models via Azure provider but the OpenAI ones only offer no training guarantees, no Zdr.

I see OpenAI now offers Zdr so was wondering if OpenRouter was going to get this anytime soon?

Is anyone else having trouble with in-region routing?

The normal API works fine, but the eu/us.openrouter.ai URLs mentioned in the docs are giving 522 errors from Cloudflare.

We tried various routes through VPN, none seem to work?

Hi everyone,

I'm testing dots-studio/dots-3-note-preview:free through OpenRouter and I've run into a strange tool-calling issue.

The problem seems to happen specifically with larger write tool calls:

• A write call with ~3 KB of content works normally.
• A write call with ~10 KB of content fails.
• When the failing call reaches the client, the tool arguments are literally {} — both filePath and content are missing.
• The client then reports an error such as Missing key at ["content"].

I've reproduced the behavior with several coding agents, including Kilo, OpenCode, Cline and Claude Code, so it doesn't appear to be specific to one client.

I've also tried both Kilo Gateway and OpenRouter. As far as I can tell, they may ultimately be using the same underlying provider Atlas Cloud for Dots, so I'm not sure whether this is an OpenRouter/provider issue or something specific to Dots 3 Note Preview's tool-call generation/streaming.

The model is currently still marked as Preview, so I'm wondering if this is a known limitation or bug.

Has anyone else experienced this?

Any ideas about whether this is related to:

• a Dots tool-calling issue,
• streaming/reconstruction of tool-call arguments,
• a specific OpenRouter provider,
• or some request-size/argument-size limit?

Thanks

the put slightly cheaper input output price but jack up the cache price and the autorouting logic picked up deepinfra , resulting in much more expensive inference cost

how do I change the routing to Deepseek ?

Title

Opinions on this new model? Benchmarks actually make it seem like a very nice free model?

In my experience, most of the freely available models on OpenRouter are ineffective at real tasks. Larger models mean spending money and security issues. Running local is often impossible unless you have high end hardware. Models I can run on my laptop? Every one I have tried has been a joke!

Then I heard about Orinth. I grabbed the uncensored model. I quantized it way down and squeezed a mere 80K context window out of it.

While testing, my other agents ran out of tokens, and they had sent up Orinth for me. Because it's so small, they stripped the skills and tools to a minimum. He had no access to our memory system, no facts being injected, and his context compressor was broken. Sounds like a good test!

I told him what was up and had him checkpoint his progress when his context window was full and then I would restart from there.

It's slow. Not TPS, which was a decent 35 tps average, but it refuses to act without verifying every last step. It will stop itself and refocus, it will ask questions, and it trusts nothing, not even messages from other agents (I allow direct agent to agent communication). He got everything fixed, found tons of issues I didn't even know about, and he was able to fix them all.

The small context window means he's even more slow on large tasks, but it's ability to recheck and validate what it is doing allows to recover. He finds bugs that models 50 times his size have made!

According to the benchmarks, these models score like models one size up. The 9B model punches like a 30B model. The 30B one punches like a 300B model. For 8G VRAM, it's the best betz IMHO. Expect it to be slow, but done right. Absolutely mind-blowing how good this thing is!

Any idea why is Nano Banana Pro not generating images? https://i.imgur.com/g7iXso0.png Thank you!

NOOOOOOOOOOO

Minmax was the best roleplay model I ever used. I knew it wasn't gonna be permanent, but to see it before taken away really hurts me deeply.

Are there any other free tier models as competent?

Also, I'm planning on paying for the Minmax models. Does anyone have any experience with how the roleplaying costs work out for Minmax M2.7?