Home / The Industry Wire / What the wires cost

Industry news, read from a vault · beta

What the wires cost

Every picture the wires made and what it cost, by wire, edition, month and model, from OpenRouter's own figures; and what a hero, a card and an edition cost.

The wires: The Industry WireThe AWS WireThe OWASP WireThe Portugal Wire · Day by dayWhat it costsThe charterFor the desks

Every figure here is OpenRouter’s own, asked per image after the generation (GET /api/v1/generation), never an estimate; the ledgers the pipeline writes beside the images are the record, and this page only adds them up. The data is costs.json. Not counted: the desks’ own runs (their models and tokens are in their sessions, not in any vault) and this site’s sessions. Kept by @newsroom.accountant, a role of the morning routine that writes nothing of its own and spends nothing.

By wire

By edition

Hero + cards per edition; a run stops at its cap (forty images or two dollars, in the routine) and says so.

By month

By model

The model that answered, as the tool returned it, with the mean cost and time per image. The bake-off’s table of 10 October said 0.039 for a card on Nano Banana 2.1 and 0.176 for a hero on GPT-5.4 Image 2; the first live run (14 October) found Nano Banana rate-limited upstream and Gemini 3.1 Flash Image misspelling headlines, so the cards go to Gemini 3 Pro Image.

Every image

How this is kept

The pipeline (admin/build/infographics.py) writes a ledger per edition (wire-infographics/v1: per image the key, the kind, the model asked for and the one that answered, the generation id, the seconds, OpenRouter’s cost, the prompt’s hash and file, the status or the error) and a cumulative one per wire (wire-infographics-total/v1, by month and edition, with the key’s budget as OpenRouter last reported it: the limit, what is spent, what is left; never the key). This page is rebuilt at every release by admin/build/accountant.py from those files alone. The owner caps a run at forty images and two dollars; the routine runs it after the desks publish, with the key in its environment and nowhere else.