Uprouter Online

Uprouter Online is an independent, developer-facing directory of AI API providers combined with a self-hostable gateway called Uprouter Connect. It tracks 388 routers — including OpenRouter, AWS Bedrock, and Alibaba Cloud — with normalized pricing, free-tier values, live uptime probes, and community-verified data. The self-hosted Connect gateway is open-source under the MIT license and available on GitHub.

What It Is

Uprouter Online has two distinct components: a directory and a gateway. The directory catalogs AI API providers with normalized USD-per-1M-token pricing, free-tier credit values, risk ratings, editorial confidence scores, and live status probes. The gateway, Uprouter Connect, is an OpenAI- and Claude-compatible unified endpoint that accepts BYOK (bring your own keys) credentials from any of the tracked providers, routes requests with configurable strategies, and returns per-request audit logs covering tokens, latency, and cost.

How the Gateway Works

Uprouter Connect exposes a single API endpoint (/api/connect/v1/chat/completions) that is compatible with both the OpenAI and Anthropic message formats, including SSE streaming. Key capabilities include:

• 19 routing strategies — first, cheapest, most-accurate, most-reliable, failover, round-robin, latency-based, cost-aware, and more
• BYOK credentials stored with AES-256-GCM encryption at rest
• Failover aliases — ordered provider lists with per-alias daily spend caps and soft-limit headers
• 3-layer resilience — per-provider circuit breaker, error cooldown, and model lockout
• Per-request metering — audit log of tokens in/out, latency, and cost for every call
• MCP server at /api/mcp (JSON-RPC 2.0) and an A2A agent protocol interface
• RTK-style compression — structured extraction and context-budget truncation

The self-hosted version ships with a pre-seeded snapshot of 104 providers and ~300 models, uses SQLite by default (zero-config), and supports optional Postgres (e.g., Neon). A built-in sandbox-echo provider lets the gateway work before any real keys are added.

The Directory and Community Layer

The directory side of Uprouter tracks free-tier allowances across four access shapes: official free tiers, signup free credits, free-only routers, and no-auth endpoints. Every entry carries a verification timestamp, a normalized USD free-credit value (with an est. flag when assumptions were required), a risk tier (low/medium/high), and a source URL. The site states that rankings are never sponsored — sort keys are neutral data signals and affiliate or commercial participation is explicitly excluded as a sort input.

Community members can vote on providers, submit evidence-based reviews with verification tags, and propose corrections to descriptions, prices, and free-tier values. Accepted corrections earn compute (the platform's internal usage currency for pooled gateway requests).

Deployment Model

Uprouter Connect is self-hostable via Node 20+ (or Bun) or Docker Compose. The managed cloud version at uprouter.online operates the same gateway with a compute-based usage model: new accounts receive a welcome compute grant, and additional compute is earned through daily check-ins, streak bonuses, validated referrals, and bounties. BYOK routing through the managed gateway carries no subscription fee — compute is only spent on pooled (Uprouter-hosted) capacity requests.

The public directory API (/api/providers, /api/models, /api/dataset, /api/status) is open with no authentication required, CORS-enabled, and licensed CC BY 4.0.

Update: Repository Created September 2026

The Uprouter Connect GitHub repository (uprouter-online/uprouter-connect) was created on September 15, 2026, under the MIT license, written primarily in TypeScript. The managed site references a last entry update of September 16, 2026, and blog posts from September 2026 cover methodology, provider reliability checking, and third-party router risks. The project is in active early development with the self-hosted gateway and managed directory running concurrently.