AI providers · OpenRouter · updated September 2, 2026

Run your AI employees through OpenRouter

One OpenRouter key gives Coordinator's agents the whole field — Claude, Gemini, GPT and hundreds of open-weight models — with honest per-model pricing shown right in the picker.

Free. No card. About two minutes to set up.

What you can delegate

A OpenRouter-powered employee, not a chatbot

An agent here holds roles exactly like a person does, and its ceiling is its roles' ceiling: whatever someone with those roles could do in Coordinator, you can hand over. OpenRouter decides how well the work gets done — not how far it reaches.

Money & books
  • Read a forwarded vendor PDF into a draft bill, validated before it touches the books
  • Watch receivables aging and draft the chase
  • Answer P&L and client-profitability questions from the live ledger
Projects & work
  • Create, file and update activities across your pipelines and boards
  • Work a queue — claim the next item, do it, hand off
  • Run the check-in round-up and keep stages honest
Time & billing
  • Log time as it works
  • Sweep unbilled hours into a draft invoice
  • Keep the time ledger clean enough to bill from
Records & forms
  • Triage form submissions into records and the right pipeline
  • Keep client records current as work happens
  • Find anything — records, contacts, history — on request
Scheduling
  • Prep today's meetings from the calendar
  • Tend booking-link intake and meeting polls
  • Keep resources and rooms straight
Chat & threads
  • Draft replies, follow-ups and summaries inside your team's threads
  • Announce what needs announcing
  • Turn a meeting thread into the follow-up tasks
The short list it can never do

Hold the Owner role. Message outside your organization before you deliberately climb the outbound ladder. Appear human in the audit trail — agent work is labeled agent work, always. Keep going after you hit pause. Everything else opens closed and is yours to grant, role by role.

The full AI-employees story — roles, fences, the outbound ladder
Why OpenRouter

What OpenRouter itself brings

Any provider on this site can power the delegation above. These are the reasons to pick OpenRouter in particular.

  • Switch models without switching vendorsTry an agent on Claude this week and an open-weight model next week — same key, same billing relationship, no new account. For finding the cheapest model that's good enough for each role, nothing beats one key over the whole field.
  • The most honest catalogueOpenRouter's API declares each model's accepted input types and price outright, so Coordinator's picker answers 'does this model read an image, and what does it cost' from the vendor's own data — not our guesses.
  • Resilience by routingWhen a host errors, OpenRouter can fail over to another provider serving the same model — pooled uptime that production teams lean on, with public rankings showing where the traffic actually goes.
  • Models

    OpenRouter models your agents can use

    Prices and lineup verified September 2, 2026. In the product, the picker is fetched live from OpenRouter on your own key — it never goes stale, and a custom model id always works if it validates.

    Claude, Gemini & GPTfrontier

    the frontier labs through one account — switch an agent between them without new keys

    GLM-5.3 Flash, DeepSeek V4 Flash, MiniMax M3open weights

    the models actually topping OpenRouter's own routing charts — cheap, fast agentic workhorses at open-weight prices

    Hundreds morelive list

    OpenRouter publishes modality and price metadata, so the picker shows what each model reads and its real per-million-token price

    Media through Coordinator's pipeline: images. The authority on current rates is OpenRouter's pricing page.

    What developers say · September 2, 2026

    OpenRouter's API, as its users describe it

    Recurring themes from public developer forums and reviews — the likes and the complaints — and how each plays out when the provider runs inside your own workspace.

    What they like
    • One key to 400+ models across 60+ providers with consolidated billing — the core value nobody disputes, now carrying on the order of a hundred trillion tokens a month.
    • Passthrough list pricing with automatic fallback to another host when a provider errors — pooled uptime that production apps lean on.
    • The public model rankings are watched industry-wide as a live gauge of what developers actually route to.
    What they complain about — and how it plays here

    Support is the loudest complaint — Trustpilot sits under two stars, mostly over slow responses, with Discord as the de facto help channel.

    Here: We can't fix another company's support desk. What Coordinator adds: connect-time validation catches key and model problems immediately with errors that name the actual vendor — and if OpenRouter stops earning its place, switching an agent to a direct vendor takes a minute, not a migration.

    Fees and credit terms surprise people: roughly 5.5% on credit purchases, a fee even on bring-your-own-key traffic past an allowance, and unused credits that can expire after a year.

    Here: Those are OpenRouter account terms and they follow your key wherever it's used — no orchestrator changes that. If the convenience stops covering the fee, the direct Anthropic, Google and OpenAI connections are one click away in the same settings screen.

    Same model, different quality by route — hosts serve different quantizations, so developers doing quality-sensitive work pin specific providers rather than trusting default routing.

    Here: Coordinator's custom-model field accepts OpenRouter's provider-pinned slugs, and the picker shows each route's own declared modality and price — so you can pin exactly what you tested.

    Outages pass through: February 2026 saw two incidents with heavy request failures, publicly post-mortemed.

    Here: A second connected provider is cheap insurance — agents aren't married to a vendor, so failover is a settings change you can make mid-incident.

    Ours to get right

    How Coordinator treats your OpenRouter key

    The section above is OpenRouter's report card. This one is ours — the plumbing decisions that make handing an agent your API key boring instead of brave.

    Stored encrypted, shown as last-four

    Your key is encrypted like every credential in Coordinator, and after connecting, nothing ever displays more than its last four characters.

    Proven before it's stored

    Connecting is a live round-trip to OpenRouter — a key that doesn't actually work can't be saved, so failures happen in settings, not mid-task.

    Billed by OpenRouter, never by us

    Zero markup, no metering, no shared key anywhere in the system. Every agent turn bills your own account at the vendor's own prices.

    Validation that can't lie

    OpenRouter's public model list answers even for a revoked key, so Coordinator validates against the authenticated key endpoint plus a live chat ping — a wrong key can't be saved.

    Getting started

    From no key to a working agent in a few minutes

    Create a key at openrouter.ai → Settings → Keys, then buy credits. One key reaches every model OpenRouter carries.

    First, at openrouter.ai
    1. 1

      Sign in at openrouter.ai (Google, GitHub or email — no separate developer account).

    2. 2

      Open Settings → Keys and choose Create Key.

    3. 3

      Name it something you'll recognise later, e.g. Coordinator. You can leave the credit limit blank or cap this key in dollars — the cap is per key, so a cap here can't be raised by topping up the account.

    4. 4

      Copy the key immediately — it starts with sk-or-v1- and is shown once.

    5. 5

      Open Settings → Credits and add credits (card or crypto). A key with no credits authenticates and then fails on every paid model.

    6. 6

      Check Settings → Privacy before sending real documents — see the note below.

    Then, in Coordinator — the actual screens
    Connect OpenRouter
    API key
    sk-or-v1-········77qe
    Validate & save

    Key verified — a live call to OpenRouter confirmed it before anything was stored. Only the last four characters are kept visible.

    Settings → AI: pick OpenRouter, paste the key. A live call to OpenRouter verifies it before anything is stored.

    Default model
    Claude, Gemini & GPT
    Claude, Gemini & GPTfrontier
    GLM-5.3 Flash, DeepSeek V4 Flash, MiniMax M3open weights
    Hundreds morelive list

    Fetched live from your key — never a stale list. Custom model ids work too.

    Choose a default model from your key's live catalogue — or set one per agent later.

    What it costs

    Billed per token on your own OpenRouter account, at roughly the underlying vendor's price. Gemini 2.5 Flash reads a one-page bill for a fraction of a US cent; Gemini 2.5 Pro and the frontier Claude and GPT models cost several times more. OpenRouter's model list shows the exact per-million-token price for every model, so compare there before switching.

    Watch out

    PRIVACY: OpenRouter is a router, so your document is handled by both OpenRouter and whichever provider serves the model. Under Settings → Privacy, leave "providers that may train on your inputs" OFF — and note that many :free model variants require it to be ON, which is not a trade to make with customer bills. Also: images only here, so a PDF bill will not extract on OpenRouter — connect Anthropic or Gemini for PDFs.

    Your key, your spend

    OpenRouter bills your account per their published per-model prices. No markup, no shared key.

    FAQ

    OpenRouter + Coordinator, asked directly

    Why use OpenRouter instead of a direct key?

    One key, every model. If you want to compare models across labs, or run different agents on different models without managing four vendor accounts, OpenRouter is the one-account answer.

    Does the picker show prices?

    Yes — OpenRouter publishes per-model pricing, and Coordinator's model labels carry the real per-million-token input price.

    Do I pay Coordinator for usage?

    No. Coordinator is free; OpenRouter bills your key directly.

    Not sure OpenRouter is the one?

    Swap the brain, keep the team

    Your agents aren't built out of OpenRouter — they're built out of roles, permissions and workflows. The model behind an agent is a setting: change it in a minute and the team, the history and the fences all stay put. Every provider we support gets the same treatment, and the same honest page:

    100% free — every feature, every seat

    Put OpenRouter on the payroll

    Coordinator is free — the only bill is the one OpenRouter already sends you.

    Free. No card. About two minutes to set up.