Auto Router
by OpenRouter · openrouter/auto · #5 cheapest of 325 paid models
Prices updated Jul 22, 2026, 1:33 AM UTC · refreshed hourly
Your prompt will be processed by a meta-model and routed to one of dozens of models (see below), optimizing for the best possible output. To see which model was used,...
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