Principles

Documentation Index

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ARouter helps developers source, route, and observe AI usage across any provider. We believe the future is multi-model and multi-provider.

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Why ARouter?

Price and Performance. ARouter continuously tracks pricing, latency, and throughput across all upstream providers, so you always get the best deal without changing a line of code. Standardized API. One endpoint, one API key — whether you’re calling OpenAI, Anthropic, Gemini, DeepSeek, or any other provider. You can switch models or providers by changing a single string. Consolidated Billing. A single credit balance covers all providers. No more juggling invoices from a dozen vendors. Higher Availability. ARouter monitors provider health in real time and routes around outages automatically. You can also supply ordered candidate models so requests always find a path to completion. Higher Rate Limits. By aggregating traffic across providers and regions, ARouter enables throughput that would be impractical to achieve on a single provider account. Unified Observability. Every request is metered — tokens, latency, cost, status — visible in your dashboard and exportable for accounting. Scoped API keys, spending limits, and per-model restrictions let you run multi-team deployments safely.

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Design Principles

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Drop-in Compatible

ARouter’s API is a strict superset of the OpenAI Chat Completions API. Any SDK or tool already using that interface — official OpenAI SDKs, LangChain, Vercel AI SDK, and more — works without changes beyond base_url and api_key. Native Anthropic and Gemini SDK paths are also supported.

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No Lock-in

Your requests, your data. ARouter does not retain prompts or completions. Metadata (token counts, latency) is stored to power your activity feed and exports, but the content of your conversations is never stored unless you explicitly opt in to prompt logging.

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Transparent Pricing

ARouter passes through upstream provider pricing with no hidden markup on inference. A small platform fee applies to credit purchases. Bring Your Own Key (BYOK) keeps your traffic free of platform costs above a small included allowance.

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Reliability by Default

Smart routing, key pooling, and automatic health checks are on by default — not optional add-ons. When a provider is degraded, ARouter reroutes without requiring any change to your application.

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Open Ecosystem

ARouter is open source. The gateway code, routing logic, and SDK implementations are available on GitHub. We welcome contributions and transparent discussion about how routing decisions are made.