Providers

A provider is an LLM gateway you connect to FreeRouter with a key you already own. FreeRouter routes across your providers and forwards each request using your key — it never resells inference.

The BYOK model

FreeRouter is bring-your-own-keys. You keep your existing accounts and billing relationships with each gateway; FreeRouter just orchestrates which one handles a given request. That means you pay providers directly — usually cheaper than layering a second markup on top — and you can walk away from any gateway by removing it from your routing rules.

You stay in control Delete a provider and FreeRouter stops using its key immediately. Nothing is locked in — your keys, your accounts, your data.

Supported gateways

OpenRouter is live today. You can store Vercel and Cloudflare keys under Providers in the dashboard, but requests targeting them return 501 until their adapters land — point routing rules at OpenRouter for now.

OpenRouter

A broad aggregator across many model families. A common default primary or the high-weight target in a %-split.

Vercel AI Gateway

Vercel's gateway for AI models. A strong failover target or performance-weighted split partner.

Cloudflare AI Gateway

Cloudflare's edge gateway. Useful as an additional failover tier or a canary target for new traffic.

More gateways (e.g. Together and others) are on the roadmap. The meta-router model means adding a provider is a config change — never an application rewrite.

Adding a provider

1
Open Providers → Add provider
In app.freerouter.com, choose the gateway you want to connect.
2
Paste your gateway key
Provide the API key from that gateway's own dashboard. FreeRouter encrypts and stores it against your workspace (keys are verified on first use, not at save time).
3
Reference it in a routing rule
Add the provider as a target in a %-split or failover rule, then attach that rule to a FreeRouter key.

How your keys are used

  • Encrypted at rest. Provider keys are encrypted in FreeRouter's store and never returned to the client after you save them.
  • Swapped per request. When a routing rule selects a gateway, FreeRouter injects that gateway's key into the upstream call. Your FreeRouter key is what your app sends; the provider key is what the gateway sees.
  • Scoped to a workspace. Keys belong to the personal or team workspace you added them in. Team members share the workspace's providers; they never see the raw key value.
  • Removable anytime. Delete a provider to revoke its use across every rule that referenced it.
Check gateway terms Some gateways place restrictions on commercial or multi-tenant BYOK routing in their terms of service. Confirm your intended usage is permitted with each provider before relying on it in production.

Model identifiers

Regardless of gateway, FreeRouter uses provider/model style identifiers in the model field so a request is unambiguous. Examples:

openai/gpt-4o-mini
anthropic/claude-3.5-sonnet
google/gemini-1.5-pro

Your routing rule selects the gateway by priority order; FreeRouter fails over to the next target on rate limits (429) or upstream errors (5xx). The model string is passed through verbatim, so use an identifier the serving gateway understands. Use GET /v1/models to see what's available to a key.

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