OpenAI Free on OpenRouter

DEVONthink Artificial Intelligence
1

I was comparing AI models this week and discovered that on OpenRouter Gpt-4.1 Mini, GPT-5, and GPT-5 Mini are all free. Perhaps there is some upper limit but I was able to do some detailed comparisons of summarization of long medical records documents- enough for me to realize that GPT-4.1 Mini is optimized for that particular task and in many ways is superior to both GPT-5 and even Claude Sonnet 4/4.5. GPT-4.1 mini is not as verbose as Claude Sonnet but is able to express essential concepts and link them to the source in medical records in a way that arguably is easier to read.

I cannot find anything which says specifically that OpenAI or OpenRouter have set this free policy. Does anyone know the details and for how long it will remain free?

2

Hm. I just tried it with a new account and with GPT-4.1 mini, OR rightly tells me that “You never bought any credits.” Does not look free to me. OTHO, I can’t even add a billing address at OR right now, so perhaps their billing/accouting is MIA?
At least the website fails to load the Stripe.js code.

3

I do presume you have to have payment method on file in order to use OpenRouter at all

I was able to add funds to use other models

This is the sort of thing I saw the last few days - OpenAI all free

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