Auto Router
by OpenRouter · openrouter/auto · #5 cheapest of 422 paid models
Prices updated Sep 20, 2026, 12:34 AM UTC · refreshed hourly
The Auto Router automatically selects the best model for your prompt, powered by the wisdom of the market. It routes you based on what the OpenRouter community collectively spends on...
Compare vs:Claude Sonnet 5Claude Opus 4.6Claude Haiku 4.5GPT-5.6 Sol
Pricing
Input
$-1.0e+6
per 1M tokens
Output
$-1.0e+6
per 1M tokens
Blended (3:1)
$-1.0e+6
3 input : 1 output
Cache read
—
per 1M cached tokens
Cache write
—
per 1M tokens
Cache & batch economics
Effective prices for Auto Router (no cache-read rate published — hits billed as normal input).
| Cache hit rate | Effective blended $/1M | Example request* | vs no cache |
|---|---|---|---|
| 0% | $-1.0e+6 | $-1.03e+5 | — |
| 50% | $-1.0e+6 | $-1.03e+5 | −0% |
| 90% | $-1.0e+6 | $-1.03e+5 | −0% |
*Example: 100K sticky context + 2K new input + 1K output. Batch discount is an approximate 50% off list rates (available for OpenAI / Anthropic / Google — not flagged for this creator). Confirm on the vendor’s pricing page.
What a request costs
| Workload | Input tokens | Output tokens | Cost / request | Cost / 1K requests |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Short chat message | 500 | 300 | $-8.00e+2 | $-8.00e+5 |
| Document summary | 8,000 | 1,000 | $-9.00e+3 | $-9.00e+6 |
| Codebase question (RAG) | 30,000 | 2,000 | $-3.20e+4 | $-3.20e+7 |
| Long-context analysis | 150,000 | 5,000 | $-1.55e+5 | $-1.55e+8 |
Specs
Context window
2M
tokens
Max output
—
tokens
Input modalities
text, image, audio, file, video
Tokenizer
Router