So a 'little bit' of bad news especially to those specifically using Deepseek v3 0324 free via openrouter, the limits have just been adjusted from 200 -> 50 requests per day. Guess you'd have to create at least four accounts to even mimic that of having the 200 requests per day limit from before.

EDIT: All free models (even non deepseek ones) are subject to the 50 requests per day limit. And for further clarification, say even if you have say $5 on your account and can access paid models, you'd still be restricted to 50 requests per day (haven't really tested it out but based on the documentation, we need at least $10 so we can have access to higher request limits)

Does openrouter have a limit for free models? If so, is there a way that I can get around it besides making a new account or using the other models?

Hey everyone,

I’ve read through the OpenRouter API rate limits documentation, but I’m still unclear about how rate limiting works for paid models.

From what I understand:

• Free models have strict daily caps (50 or 1000 requests depending on credit balance).

• For paid models, it seems there are no fixed request-per-minute limits — usage is mainly controlled by your credit balance.

• Adding more credits doesn’t increase a hard rate limit, but just allows more requests as long as you have credits.

• There’s no official service tier or quota upgrade system like OpenAI’s usage tiers.

• Throughput may depend on the underlying model provider.

Can anyone confirm if that’s accurate?

Also, has anyone experienced 429 errors or other signs of throttling when using paid models heavily? Was it from OpenRouter or the upstream provider?

Appreciate any insights!

So a 'little bit' of bad news especially to those specifically using Deepseek v3 0324 free via openrouter, the limits have just been adjusted from 200 -> 50 requests per day. Guess you'd have to create at least four accounts to even mimic that of having the 200 requests per day limit from before.

For clarification, all free models (even non deepseek ones) are subject to the 50 requests per day limit. And for further clarification, say even if you have say $5 on your account and can access paid models, you'd still be restricted to 50 requests per day (haven't really tested it out but based on the documentation, we need at least $10 so we can have access to higher request limits)

80,000 input tokens/minute would be enough. It’s still pennies per minute. There’s a way around it (openrouter) but why make us do that when it’s trivial to change the number from 40 to 80 in the settings?

I didn’t want to make a complaint thread but it’s so arbitrary to have the limit be right where it’s annoying for a common use (cline)

I have this error:

I have 15 credits and my limit is 1000 requests per day for free models. But today I did only 400+ requests. I started using openrouter a few days ago and my total requests is 629.

How is this possible?

For the first time, I hit my daily limit using OpenRouter free models (Deepseek R1 zero free and Qwen 32B free, by the way). So, I wanted to ask: what criteria is used to determine it's a new day of usage? Do you have to wait 24 hours until it's exactly the same time as when you got the message of reaching the limit? Or is it more of an approximate threshold, like a conventional reset moment according to a specific time zone? If the latter is the case, what hour and timezone would that reset be? In other words, how can I know when to expect to be able to use my daily 200 requests again?

Free limit gives 200 requests per day, and i need around 400, so i have to create new account and get another api key. My question is they check IP or something so i can freely add another key and wrap in a try catch if first one fails aka gets limit? I'm using on a dummy non profitable app.

It's borderline unusable at this point

It's getting kind of frustrating to keep getting rate limit errors on the Gemini models on Openrouter. I realize it's probably because they're free, but I'm nowhere near any limits. Anyone have any idea what's going on?

Anyone else seeing quota limits exceeded using the new Gemini Pro 2.5 through OpenRouter?

I got three replies.

Three.

All 47 other requests got errors, or load hangs for upwards of 20 minutes that I had to cancel and try again.

And I'm expected to pay money for this?

I am curious about openrouter. Is it just for distributing your api calls to the current cheapest provider? Or are there other useful aspects? Also uses it the normal OpenAi API structure, because I’ve already build a fairly big app and rewriting the api integration would take a bit. Also how reliable is it?

https://openrouter.ai/

How does it work? Is it spammy/legit? I only ask because with all my recent comments about my workflow and tools I use, I have been getting unsolicited DMs, inviting me to "join, we have room". Just seems spammy to me.

My bill this month for ChatGPT Pro + API, Claude Sonnet + API, and Cursor will probably be over $60 easy. I'm okay with that.

BUT if this OpenRouter service is cheaper? why not, right?

I just don't get it.

ELI5?

Half of this sub is about how terrible the Claude limits are. Come on guys, everyone just use OpenRouter Sonnet API. Haven't seen denial of service yet.

Title, i've seen many people using things like DeepSeek, Chat GPT, Gemini and even Claude through OpenRouter instead of the main Api and it made me really curious, why is that? Is there some sort of extra benefit that i'm not aware of? Because as far as i can see, it even causes it to cost more, so, what's up with that?

I have run into the issue where I can't generate any responses anymore, and since I have no idea how to fix this error code, I'm kind of at my wits end. I've been using Goliath 120B

I've looked it up on Openrouters website and it said I've exceeded my limit for how many requests I can send and that I can check it bysending a GET request, but I have no idea how to do that or how to fix this at all. I have plenty Credits left, so that's not the issue.

Can someone who's more versed in this whole thing help out?