OpenRouter vs Google Vertex AI
Same workloads, both price lists, refreshed daily. On shared line items today: OpenRouter is cheaper on 8 of 30 shared models (input or output price), Google Vertex AI on 3.
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
Google Vertex AI
Gemini plus 100+ models in Google Cloud's ML platform, with enterprise governance, grounding and tuning pipelines..
- Enterprise governance
- Grounding with Google Search
- Model Garden variety
Shared models, priced by both
List prices refreshed 2026-10-08 ยท input $/1M tokens| Model | OpenRouter in/out | Google Vertex AI in/out | Cheaper input |
|---|---|---|---|
| GPT-OSS 20B | $0.018 / $0.090 | $0.070 / $0.250 | OpenRouter |
| Mistral Nemo | $0.019 / $0.030 | $3.00 / $3.00 | OpenRouter |
| GPT-OSS 120B | $0.037 / $0.170 | $0.090 / $0.360 | OpenRouter |
| Gemma 4 26B A4B | $0.076 / $0.255 | $0.150 / $0.600 | OpenRouter |
| Qwen3 Next 80B A3B Instruct | $0.100 / $1.10 | $0.150 / $1.20 | OpenRouter |
| Claude Haiku 5.5 | $0.100 / $0.500 | $0.100 / $0.500 | tie |
| Gemini 2.5 Flash Lite | $0.100 / $0.400 | $0.100 / $0.400 | tie |
| Qwen3 Next 80B A3B Thinking | $0.150 / $1.20 | $0.150 / $1.20 | tie |
| Mistral Small 4 | $0.150 / $0.600 | $0.100 / $0.300 | Google Vertex AI |
| Llama 3.3 70B | $0.220 / $0.500 | $0.720 / $0.720 | OpenRouter |
| Gemini 3.1 Flash Lite | $0.250 / $1.50 | $0.250 / $1.50 | tie |
| Claude-3-Haiku | $0.250 / $1.25 | $0.250 / $1.25 | tie |
| DeepSeek V3.2 | $0.280 / $0.420 | $0.560 / $1.68 | OpenRouter |
| Gemini 2.5 Flash | $0.300 / $2.50 | $0.300 / $2.50 | tie |
| Codestral 2508 | $0.300 / $0.900 | $0.200 / $0.600 | Google Vertex AI |
| Gemini 3.5 Flash Lite | $0.300 / $2.50 | $0.300 / $2.50 | tie |
| Mistral Medium 3 | $0.400 / $2.00 | $0.400 / $2.00 | tie |
| Qwen3 235B A22B | $0.455 / $1.82 | $0.220 / $0.880 | Google Vertex AI |
| Gemini 3 Flash Preview | $0.500 / $3.00 | $0.500 / $3.00 | tie |
| DeepSeek R1 | $0.700 / $2.50 | $1.35 / $5.40 | OpenRouter |
| Gemini 3.7 Flash | $0.750 / $3.75 | $0.750 / $3.75 | tie |
| Gemini 3.6 Flash | $0.750 / $3.75 | $0.750 / $3.75 | tie |
| Gemini 3.8 Flash | $0.750 / $3.75 | $0.750 / $3.75 | tie |
| Claude Haiku 4.5 | $1.00 / $5.00 | $1.00 / $5.00 | tie |
| Gemini 2.5 Pro | $1.25 / $10.00 | $1.25 / $10.00 | tie |
| Grok 4.3 | $1.25 / $2.50 | $1.25 / $2.50 | tie |
| Gemini 3.5 Flash | $1.50 / $9.00 | $1.50 / $9.00 | tie |
| Claude Sonnet 5 | $2.00 / $10.00 | $2.00 / $10.00 | tie |
| Mistral Large | $2.00 / $6.00 | $2.00 / $6.00 | tie |
| Grok 4.6 | $2.00 / $6.00 | $2.00 / $6.00 | tie |
Cheaper-on-count is a tally of listed prices, not a quality verdict: throughput, reliability and quantization differ between providers. Disclosure.