In short
OpenRouter routes requests to hundreds of models across many third-party providers at their list prices, adding a 5.5% fee on credit purchases (8% on Business). It does not log prompts by default and lets you exclude providers that train on data, require zero-data-retention routing on every plan, and keep traffic in the EU or US on Business and Enterprise plans. SolCard Inference offers four models of its own, GLM-5.3 and DeepSeek V4.1 Flash among them, at roughly two to four times the labs' own list rates. In exchange it offers a no-KYC wallet or email sign-up, a 'no refusals' stance for professional work, payment from a SolCard balance and a one-sentence Claude Code and Codex install that keeps your existing models. Its no-log claim is a company statement without published policies as of 31 October 2026.
The short answer
OpenRouter and SolCard Inference look alike from a developer's chair: one API key, OpenAI- and Anthropic-compatible endpoints, open-weight models, and crypto accepted. Underneath they are different kinds of business.
OpenRouter is a marketplace. It routes your request to one of many independent providers hosting hundreds of models. It passes their list prices through with no markup on inference and takes a fee when you buy credits. What happens to your prompt depends on which provider serves it, and OpenRouter gives you controls to restrict that.
SolCard Inference is a single provider. It offers four models of its own, prices them above the labs' own rates, and sells a specific package: no identity check, "no refusals" for professional work, a no-log promise, payment from a SolCard balance, and a one-sentence install into Claude Code and Codex.
So OpenRouter wins on choice, price and documented controls. SolCard wins on the no-KYC account, its refusal stance, and adding open models to a coding agent without giving up your existing Claude or ChatGPT models. Here is the detail.
How each one works
When you call OpenRouter, you name a model. It picks a provider for that model. By default it compares what a good response would cost at each provider, weighing throughput, latency, reliability and tool-call quality alongside price, unless you set your own routing preferences. It forwards the request and bills you the provider's own rate, with "no markup on inference pricing", in the words of its FAQ. A popular open model can have many providers behind it, each with its own price, speed, context limit and data policy. You can pin a provider, exclude some, or filter by policy. That flexibility is the product.
When you call SolCard Inference, there is no routing decision for you to make. You choose one of four model IDs (Fast on DeepSeek V4.1 Flash, Large on GLM-5.3, Base, and Large legacy on GLM-5.2) and SolCard serves it. It says your prompts "never reach the labs behind them", which implies it runs the open weights itself rather than forwarding to Z.ai or DeepSeek. It does not say whose GPUs it runs them on. The full product is covered in our SolCard Inference explainer.
Side by side
| SolCard Inference | OpenRouter | |
|---|---|---|
| Model choice | 4 text models | Hundreds, from most major labs and open-weight families |
| Who serves the request | SolCard (infrastructure undisclosed) | One of many third-party providers, per request |
| Pricing | SolCard's own rates, above market on shared models | Provider list price, no inference markup |
| Fees | None beyond token rates | 5.5% on credit purchases (Standard), 8% (Business) |
| Prompt logging | "Nothing you send is logged" (company statement) | Not logged by default; opt-in logging gives a 1% discount |
| Provider data controls | Not applicable: one provider | Exclude providers that train on data; zero-data-retention routing on every plan; EU or US in-region routing on Business |
| Refusal stance | "No refusals" for legitimate work; unpublished usage policy | Varies by model and provider |
| Account | Wallet or email, no KYC | Account required |
| Crypto | Crypto deposit or SolCard balance | USDC accepted for credits; crypto purchases are non-refundable |
| API formats | OpenAI Chat Completions, Responses, Anthropic Messages | OpenAI Chat Completions and Responses, plus an Anthropic Messages-compatible endpoint |
| Output cap | 32,768 tokens per request | Per model and provider |
What you pay
OpenRouter's pricing is simple to state. You pay what the provider charges, plus a fee on the credits you buy: 5.5% on the Standard plan and 8% on Business, per its pricing page. There are no minimums. If you bring your own provider key (BYOK), the first $25,000 of list-price usage each month carries no fee, and 5% applies after that.
For the two models SolCard serves by name, the gap is easy to estimate. DeepSeek's own API lists V4.1 Flash at $0.30 per million input tokens and $1.20 output at peak times, and half that off-peak. Z.ai's own API lists GLM-5.3 at $1.40 input and $4.40 output. Third-party providers on OpenRouter set their own rates, which can be higher or lower. SolCard charges $1.25 and $2.50 on Fast, and $3.75 and $6.25 on Large.
| Workload | SolCard | Via OpenRouter, assuming the lab's own list rate, incl. 5.5% fee |
|---|---|---|
| DeepSeek V4.1 Flash, 2M input + 0.5M output | $3.75 | ≈ $1.27 |
| GLM-5.3, 2M input + 0.5M output | $10.63 | ≈ $5.28 |
| DeepSeek V4.1 Flash coding session, 40 turns (55K cached + 5K new + 1.5K out each) | $0.68 | ≈ $0.15 |
The OpenRouter column is an estimate. Each provider sets its own rate and cache discount, and the router may pick a provider that charges more or less than the lab itself, but the order of magnitude holds. For the same open model, routing through a marketplace costs roughly a half to a quarter of SolCard's price. That difference is what SolCard's convenience and positioning have to justify.
Privacy: who sees your prompt
This is the comparison people get wrong most often. Both services say they don't log your prompts, but the two promises cover different parts of the path.
OpenRouter's promise covers OpenRouter. Its FAQ says "Prompt and completion are not logged by default", with only metadata kept (timestamps, model, token counts). Then the request goes to a third-party provider with its own policy. OpenRouter's controls are what make this manageable:
- You can exclude providers that store data or may train on it, in your privacy settings or per request with the
data_collection: "deny"routing option. - You can require zero-data-retention endpoints with
zdr: true, which its pricing page says is available on every plan. - On the Business and Enterprise plans, you can keep requests inside the EU or the US.
If no provider meets your settings, the request fails instead of quietly going somewhere else. That is the right behaviour.
SolCard's promise covers the whole path, but only by assertion. SolCard says your prompts never go on to the model labs, so its no-log statement is meant to cover everything after you press send. As of 31 October 2026, SolCard hasn't published a data-handling policy, its hosting provider or its region. One part is checkable: its coding-agent installer runs open-source routing code on your own machine with request logging off.
The practical difference: with OpenRouter you build a defensible privacy position out of documented policies and settings. With SolCard you trust one operator's word.
Refusals and content policy
OpenRouter doesn't impose one refusal policy. What gets refused depends mainly on the model you pick, since each lab trains its own safety behaviour, and sometimes on the provider serving it. If you want a more permissive model, you choose one and route to it.
SolCard makes refusal behaviour part of the brand. Its landing page contrasts mainstream assistants refusing security and safety work with its own models completing it: reproducing a disclosed CVE in a lab, writing malware detections, generating adversarial test sets. Its two named models are built on open-weight models that are also available through OpenRouter, so the underlying behaviour should be similar. The difference is the promise and the framing, plus a documented 403 content_policy_violation backed by a usage policy SolCard hasn't published.
Accounts and payment
- No identity check: this is SolCard's clearest advantage. You sign up with a wallet or an email address and fund the account with crypto or from a SolCard card balance, with no card on file. New accounts get $1 of free credit, according to SolCard's install runbooks.
- OpenRouter: needs an account. It takes card and crypto (USDC) for credits, and notes that crypto payments are never refundable.
Neither option is anonymous in the strict sense. On-chain payments are traceable to a wallet. If you hold a Platinum SolCard, its identity-verified owner is linked to anything paid from it.
Using them in coding agents
Both speak the formats coding agents use. OpenRouter serves Chat Completions and Responses, plus an Anthropic Messages-compatible endpoint it calls the "Anthropic Skin", and it publishes an official Claude Code guide: set ANTHROPIC_BASE_URL to https://openrouter.ai/api, put your OpenRouter key in ANTHROPIC_AUTH_TOKEN, and leave ANTHROPIC_API_KEY empty. Two caveats from that guide matter. Claude Code through OpenRouter "is only guaranteed to work with the Anthropic first-party provider", so non-Anthropic models carry compatibility risk. And because the setup replaces Claude Code's credential, all of its traffic goes through OpenRouter and is billed there, not to a Claude subscription.
SolCard takes a different route. Paste one sentence into Claude Code or Codex and the agent follows SolCard's runbook. It installs a checksum-verified open-source proxy (CLIProxyAPI) that runs only on your machine and adds SolCard's models to the model picker below your existing Claude or ChatGPT models, which keep running on your own login. Nothing is replaced. Our tutorial on using other models in Claude Code and Codex explains both patterns.
Which one to use
| If you… | Choose |
|---|---|
| Want many models, or to switch freely between labs | OpenRouter |
| Care most about cost on open-weight models | OpenRouter |
| Need documented data policies, zero-data-retention routing or EU data residency | OpenRouter |
| Need multimodal models or replies longer than 32,768 tokens | OpenRouter |
| Won't do identity verification for an AI account | SolCard Inference |
| Want to pay from a SolCard balance | SolCard Inference |
| Want GLM-5.3 or DeepSeek beside your existing Claude or ChatGPT models, with a one-sentence install | SolCard Inference |
| Do security or safety work and want a provider that markets compliance with it | SolCard Inference, or a permissive model chosen on OpenRouter |
Our read
For most developers, OpenRouter is the default and SolCard is a niche tool. OpenRouter is cheaper for the same weights, offers vastly more choice, and its privacy controls are documented, configurable and fail closed. Those properties matter more than a no-log slogan when you have to justify a provider to a client or a security reviewer.
SolCard earns its place in a few specific cases: when identity verification is a hard no, when the money already sits on a SolCard, or when you want a strong open model beside your existing models in a coding agent this afternoon, without editing a config file yourself. If one of those is you, the premium buys something real. If not, route through OpenRouter and use its privacy settings. How to control AI API costs explains how to measure what either choice actually costs on your own traffic.
Common questions
What is the difference between OpenRouter and SolCard Inference?
OpenRouter is a marketplace: it forwards each request to one of many independent providers for the model you name, at their price, and gives you controls over which providers qualify. SolCard Inference is a single provider: it offers four models of its own (built on GLM-5.3, DeepSeek V4.1 Flash, GLM-5.2 and an undisclosed model) and sets its own prices.
Does OpenRouter charge a markup?
OpenRouter says there is no markup on inference pricing: you pay the provider's rate. It charges a platform fee when you buy credits, 5.5% on the Standard plan and 8% on Business, and a 5% fee on bring-your-own-key usage above $25,000 a month.
Does OpenRouter log prompts?
Not by default. Its FAQ says prompts and completions are not logged unless you opt in, which earns a 1% discount; metadata such as timestamps, model and token counts is kept. The provider that serves your request has its own policy, so OpenRouter lets you exclude providers that train on data and require zero-data-retention routing.
Is SolCard Inference cheaper than OpenRouter?
No. At the labs' own list rates plus OpenRouter's 5.5% fee, the same open-weight models come to roughly a quarter to a half of SolCard's price. For example, 2 million input and 0.5 million output tokens on DeepSeek V4.1 Flash cost about $1.27 at DeepSeek's peak list rate plus the fee, versus $3.75 on SolCard. Individual OpenRouter providers may charge more or less than the lab.
Do I need an account or KYC?
OpenRouter requires an account; it accepts cards and USDC, and crypto purchases are non-refundable. SolCard Inference needs only a wallet or an email address, with no identity verification, and can be paid from a SolCard card balance.
Which should a developer choose?
OpenRouter for model choice, lower cost, documented data controls, multimodal models or replies longer than 32,768 tokens. SolCard Inference if you will not do identity verification, already hold a SolCard balance, or want GLM-5.3 or DeepSeek beside your existing Claude or ChatGPT models in Claude Code or Codex with a one-sentence install. OpenRouter also has an official Claude Code setup, but it replaces Claude Code's credential and is only guaranteed with Anthropic's own models.
