AltRouter, an OpenRouter alternative

# The AI Router that won't sell out. Source: [https://altrouter.net/](https://altrouter.net/) [Join Waitlist](https://altrouter.net/#waitlist)OPEN ROUTING INFRASTRUCTURE OpenRouter is selling to Stripe\. That means the main routing layer for open models will be owned by a payment processor\. Infrastructure for AI shouldn't be a locked\-in monopoly\. And it won't be, we will make sure of that\. It's time for an alternative\. A two\-pronged system: On one hand, an OpenRouter alternative\. On the other hand, efficient model hosting with \(almost\) all the advantages of local and none of the downsides\. ### Router OpenRouter but better\. - •**Open source\!** - •**No enshittification\.**Built to be cheaper and better, and no selling out\! - •**Flat fee\.**2\.5% on top of raw provider costs\. We will try to get volume pricing to get it down to effectively 0%\. - •**Provider agnostic\.**Routing to the optimal provider based on your set target price, speed, quantization and data\-retention\. No prioritization or getting paid off\! - •**Transparent\.**Every provider must show exactly what quantization of a model they are running, and their data\-retention policy\. - •**Private\.**Just like any other router we of course can't control what providers are doing, but we don't save any prompts\. ### Shared 'Local' It's becoming financially unviable to run SOTA locally\. We think we got a solution: Shared Trustless Remote Compute\. Instead of everyone buying \(or renting\) a 16k PRO 6000, we rent them together while keeping the control over the models and data\. - •**Open source\!** - •**Model Shares\.**Funds get pooled with others that want to run the same model to maximize runtime efficiency of rented GPUs and keep costs competitive\. - •**Proof of weights\.**Cryptographic hash per model for validation of actually running the exact weights that got uploaded\. - •**No prompt retention\.**Prompts will get deleted after caching timeframe\. Because the system is transparent, unlike routers and providers, this method can actually guarantee that\. - •**The only upside of local that can't be done\.**Running models offline will naturally never be achievable with this system\. But the lack of the other downsides should compensate for this tenfold\. Hello\! We are*Stefan*and*Arian*, AI enthusiasts from europe\. Ah, before we continue, let's get one thing out of the way\.**We are not vibe\-coders\.**Between the two of us we have a combined experience of 15 years building enterprise software in C\#, C\+\+ and Rust, as well as web frontends in JS, TS, React and Tailwind\. Therefore this thing will be done**properly**\. So what's this? Why are we building this? Well, two reasons\. Reason number 1, running open\-weight SOTA models as we want, locally and with full control, is getting too expensive\. Reason number 2, OpenRouter, while already only barely an alternative, being a cheaper way to get open\-weight models and that's it, just**[decided to sell out](https://techcrunch.com/2026/08/16/stripe-will-reportedly-acquire-ai-gateway-startup-openrouter-for-7b/)**\. A quasi\-monopoly on AI routing getting acquired by payment processor monopoly?***Awesome\!***Enshittification probably soon?***Great\!*** That was basically the final straw\. It was time to get off our asses and throw our hat in the ring to actually build what we wanted\. So what's our idea? Well first of all and more urgently, an OpenRouter alternative that's cheaper, better and more transparent\. Apart from the obvious selling out thing, OpenRouter always had issues with proper routing to the cheapest providers as well as transparency about what happens with prompts or what quantization the models by providers actually run\. We want to have none of that, as simple as that\. But what we really need is a way to run models with control more efficiently\. We are not going to 100% use the GPUs we bought for our local racks, and with 1T models getting that is an even worse financial decision than before\. But what other way is there right now to guarantee that we control the model that is running as well as the data we feed to it? There isn't really one\. And quite frankly, our idea is not 1:1 going to be that either, but it is the closest in spirit we came up with\. If many people can share the same instance, guaranteeing both the model as well as the privacy of the data, actual cost of inference drops massively while keeping the core spirit of running locally intact\. Of course, running it this way means it will never be offline, on\-prem, without internet access\. One effectively still has to trust someone\. But we will do the best we can to get as close as possible\. So, we are going to build both, one after the other\. And we hope you will see as much in our solution as we do\. ### Phase 1: Waitlist & Setup Onboard the first users and providers\. Build a strong ToS and**GDPR\-focused**Privacy Policy to build trust\. ### Phase 2: Router Development Build the router engine with the transparency features\. ### Phase 3: Router Release Beta time\! After this one works and goes out of beta, we go to the next\. ### Phase 4: Shared 'Local' Development Build the system for shared instancing\. ### Phase 5: Shared 'Local' Release Beta phase again, after that the full featureset we intend should be finished\. ### For Users Join the waitlist to get early API access\. Naturally, no spam\. You're in\. We'll be in touch soon\. ### For Providers Are you a model host or GPU provider? Please contact us\! Copied to clipboard\! PGP Key available soon