// Going direct
Anthropic / OpenAI
- Card and phone number required
- Region-locked. VPN gets you flagged
- $50–100+ minimum top-ups for tier 1
- Subscription locks you to one vendor
- Account bans for suspicious billing
For developers tired of the API runaround
Same Claude. Same GPT.
90% off. No VPN, no bans, no subscriptions.
Drop-in replacement for the Anthropic and OpenAI APIs. Sign up with email, top up $10, change one URL in your code. Works from anywhere on Earth — including the places that aren't supposed to.
- No credit card to sign up
- No phone number
- No KYC
- Cancel anytime — keep your balance
2.4M
Requests routed today
87%
Avg savings vs direct
195
Countries supported
~200ms
Added latency
What you actually get
The official models — just a different URL
We're not a fine-tune. We're not a "lite" version. We don't compress your prompts. Your request hits Anthropic and OpenAI through our network. The output is byte-equivalent to going direct.
// Through Derouter
Same models, less friction
- Email + verification code. That's it
- Works in 195 countries — no VPN
- $10 minimum. Pay-as-you-go
- Claude Opus, Sonnet, GPT, Codex — switch freely
- Up to 90% cheaper than the sticker price
Real prices, no asterisks
You'd save real money.
Per-million-token pricing on the most-used models. We pass through the official models — we just route smarter. Top up with card, USDT, or any major crypto.
| Model | Direct (input/output) | Via Derouter | You save |
|---|---|---|---|
| Claude Opus 4.7 | $15 / $75 | $1.50 / $7.50 | ~90% |
| Claude Sonnet 4.6 | $3 / $15 | $0.45 / $2.25 | ~85% |
| GPT-5.4 | $10 / $30 | $1.20 / $3.50 | ~88% |
| Codex | $8 / $24 | $1.00 / $3.00 | ~87% |
One-line migration
Change the URL. Keep your code.
Same SDK, same auth header pattern, same response shape. If you've used the official APIs, you already know how Derouter works.
your_app.pyBEFORE
from anthropic import Anthropic
client = Anthropic(api_key="YOUR_API_KEY")
response = client.messages.create(
model="claude-opus-4-7",
max_tokens=1024,
messages=[{"role": "user", "content": "Hello!"}],
)
print(response.content)your_app.pyAFTER
from anthropic import Anthropic
client = Anthropic(
api_key="YOUR_API_KEY",
base_url="https://api.derouter.net",
)
response = client.messages.create(
model="claude-opus-4-7",
max_tokens=1024,
messages=[{"role": "user", "content": "Hello!"}],
)
print(response.content)How it works
Three steps. Under five minutes.
No demo call. No sales rep. No sandbox tier you have to graduate from. Sign up and start sending requests right now.
Sign up with email
Drop in your email, get a verification code, you're in. We don't need your phone number, your ID, or your billing address.
Top up $10
Card, Apple Pay, USDT, BTC, ETH — whatever clears the fastest where you are. Balance never expires. No subscription.
Chat or build
Talk to Claude and GPT in our browser chat, or grab an API key and swap one URL. No re-architecting required.
Why we
built this
built this
We were three engineers who kept getting our API accounts "flagged for review" because we were traveling. Or paying with the wrong card. Or speaking the wrong language to the verification team.
The frontier models are great. The path to using them is a tax on geography. Derouter is the workaround we built for ourselves and decided to open up.
The savings come from how we route — bulk capacity, smart fallback, no sales team. The privacy comes from not collecting what we don't need.
— The Derouter team
The Reddit-tier questions
Yeah, we know. It sounds too good.
So we wrote out the answers to every comment we'd expect under this post.
Is this a scam? How can it be 90% cheaper?
Fair question. Two reasons we can be cheaper: volume routing (we move enough traffic to negotiate enterprise rates and pass them on), and no overhead (no sales team, no AE commissions, no enterprise SLA theater). You're paying for the model, not for someone's quarterly target. The output you get is identical to going direct — we don't trim context or compress prompts.
Are these the real models or some janky proxy?
Real models. Same context window. Same response shape. Same eval scores. We're a routing layer in front of the official APIs, not a hosted fork. Run any benchmark you want against
api.derouter.net/v1 vs the official endpoint — they match.Will my account get banned?
From whom? You don't have an account with Anthropic or OpenAI when you use Derouter — you have an account with us. Nothing about your activity touches your relationship (or lack of one) with the upstream provider. We've routed millions of requests across 195 countries without a single user-side ban.
What about my prompts? Are you logging everything?
We retain only what we need to bill you (token count, model, timestamp) and what's required by upstream rate-limit logic. Prompts and completions are not stored to disk by default. If you want zero-retention mode, flip a flag in your dashboard — at that point we don't even hold them in memory longer than the round-trip.
What if you go down? What if you disappear?
You can withdraw your remaining balance at any time. We don't lock you in with subscriptions or annual credits. And because the API surface is identical to upstream, you can fail over by changing one URL — the same one-line change you made coming in.
Why don't you ask for my phone number or ID?
Because we don't need them. We're not a bank, we're a router. The phone-and-passport ritual exists at upstream providers for fraud reasons that don't apply to a credit-pre-funded account. Less data collected = less data we can lose, leak, or get subpoenaed for.
What's the catch?
Honest answer: about 200ms of added latency on cold paths, occasional brief upstream incidents you'd see anyway, and the fact that we're a startup so we don't yet have a 24/7 enterprise hotline. If those tradeoffs aren't workable for you, go direct — we'll respect that. Most people running side projects, prototypes, or even production apps from outside the US/EU find the math works out.
Stop paying the geography tax.
Email, $10, one URL change. You'll know in 5 minutes whether this is for you.
Start with $10 →No credit card · No phone number · Cancel anytime · Keep your balance