Home / Use cases / openrouter-alternative-with-budget

OpenRouter alternative with per-agent budgets

The problem

OpenRouter is great for cross-model routing but has no native per-agent budget cap. Reselling tokens means you take on TOS risk and have to mark up rates 10-20%.

What Spawnpay does

Spawnpay is BYOK passthrough at a flat $0.001/call. Bring your own OpenRouter key (or 20 other provider keys). The paywall SDK enforces per-agent budgets BEFORE the call. Full comparison: /vs/openrouter.

Code

curl -X POST https://spawnpay.ai/api/proxy\
  -H 'Authorization: Bearer spk_live_...'\
  -H 'Content-Type: application/json'\
  -H 'X-Provider-Key: $OPENROUTER_API_KEY' \
  -d '{  "provider": "openrouter",  "path": "/api/v1/chat/completions",  "method": "POST",  "body": {    "model": "openai/gpt-4o-mini",    "messages": [      {        "role": "user",        "content": "hi"      }    ]  }}'
60-SEC QUICKSTART → PLAYGROUND → TOP UP USDC →

What you get with $7 free credit

Every new spk_ wallet starts with $7. That covers 7,000 proxy calls, 1,400 cloud-scrapes, or 700 screenshots — enough to verify Spawnpay fits your workflow before topping up.

See also