OpenRouter vs SambaNova
Same workloads, both price lists, refreshed daily. On shared line items today: OpenRouter is cheaper on 7 of 11 shared models (input or output price), SambaNova on 0.
OpenRouter
One API key for 340+ models across every major provider, with automatic failover and pass-through pricing. The fastest way to hedge provider risk or A/B models without new integrations.
- 340+ models, one integration
- Automatic provider failover
- Pass-through pricing, small platform fee
SambaNova
RDU-based inference cloud serving large open models (405B-class) at high speed with per-token pricing..
- Fast large-model serving
- Full-precision open models
Shared models, priced by both
List prices refreshed 2026-08-23 ยท input $/1M tokens| Model | OpenRouter in/out | SambaNova in/out | Cheaper input |
|---|---|---|---|
| Llama 3.2 1B Instruct | $0.027 / $0.201 | $0.040 / $0.080 | OpenRouter |
| Llama 3.1 8B | $0.050 / $0.080 | $0.100 / $0.200 | OpenRouter |
| Llama 3.2 3B | $0.050 / $0.330 | $0.080 / $0.160 | OpenRouter |
| Qwen3 32B | $0.080 / $0.280 | $0.400 / $0.800 | OpenRouter |
| Llama 3.3 70B | $0.100 / $0.320 | $0.600 / $1.20 | OpenRouter |
| Gemma 4 31B | $0.100 / $0.340 | $0.380 / $1.15 | OpenRouter |
| GPT-OSS 120B | $0.180 / $0.800 | $0.220 / $0.590 | OpenRouter |
| MiniMax M2.7 | $0.240 / $0.960 | $0.600 / $2.40 | OpenRouter |
| DeepSeek V3.2 | $0.280 / $0.400 | $3.00 / $4.50 | OpenRouter |
| DeepSeek R1 | $0.550 / $2.19 | $5.00 / $7.00 | OpenRouter |
| DeepSeek R1 Distill Llama 70B | $0.800 / $0.800 | $0.700 / $1.40 | SambaNova |
Cheaper-on-count is a tally of listed prices, not a quality verdict: throughput, reliability and quantization differ between providers. Disclosure.