OpenRouter's 5.5% credit fee vs Sume's list x 1.25 margin

OpenRouter's pricing page says inference is billed at the provider's list price on every plan, with a platform fee on credit purchases: 5.5% on Standard and 8% on Business. Sume applies a margin per generation instead: its docs say every video model is billed at provider list times 1.25, reserved when you submit.

So the two sit in different places. One adds a fee when money goes in, the other builds the margin into each job's price. This page works through what that means with a made-up number, and flags what neither page tells you.

What does OpenRouter's pricing page say?

Read on 2026-10-02, the page lists four tiers. Free offers "25+ free models" from "4 free providers". Standard is pay-as-you-go with a 5.5% platform fee on credit purchases. Business is also pay-as-you-go with an 8% fee. Enterprise has custom pricing with fee discounts available. All plans reach "500+ models" from "80+ providers" at provider list prices, and "Inference is billed at the provider's list price on every plan." The fee applies only when purchasing credits, not per request.

Standard and above include prompt caching, budgets and spend controls and management APIs; Business adds EU and US in-region routing; Enterprise adds SSO and contractual SLAs. The page does not say how the fee appears at checkout, so this post does not work out an exact dollar figure for a top-up.

What does Sume charge?

The Sume video docs say billing is the workspace USD balance, reserved on submit at provider list times 1.25 for every model, and that usage.cost on the job is the Sume billable amount. Cancelled and failed jobs release the reservation, and successful completion captures it. The catalog (GET /v1/videos/models) publishes pricing_skus per model so you can read the per-unit price before you call.

What does a worked example look like?

Take an invented list price of $0.10 per output second and a 10 second clip, so $1.00 at list. Under Sume's rule the reservation is $1.25. Under OpenRouter the clip is billed at $1.00 and the platform fee applies to the credits you bought to pay for it; at 5.5% that is a further 5.5 cents of fee per $1.00 of spend, if the fee is charged on top of the purchase amount, which you should confirm on OpenRouter's checkout. On those assumptions the gap is about 19.5 cents per clip in OpenRouter's favor.

That arithmetic uses a made-up price and one reading of the fee, so treat it as a template. Run the same numbers with real list prices from each catalog.

What do you get for the difference?

Sume's margin pays for features the docs describe: sume/auto routing that picks a family for you, durable jobs readable by id, an Idempotency-Key that makes paid retries safe, queue-first admission that accepts valid jobs as queued, and results mirrored to Sume-owned media URLs. OpenRouter lists a larger model set (500+ models from 80+ providers), caching and budget controls. If you only need the cheapest route to a specific model and can handle retries yourself, the list-price model wins on cost. If you value the job layer, the margin is the price of it.

To check how the spend lands in your account, read GET /v1/balance and GET /v1/usage; Sume's docs say the public API exposes balance and usage reads and no top-up endpoint.

curl https://api.sume.com/v1/balance -H "Authorization: Bearer $SUME_API_KEY"
curl https://api.sume.com/v1/usage   -H "Authorization: Bearer $SUME_API_KEY"

What should you verify before deciding?

Check how OpenRouter shows the fee on a top-up, and read pricing_skus for your exact Sume model. Compare at your real monthly volume, because a fee on purchases and a margin on usage scale in the same direction but with different constants. See OpenRouter image pricing lines vs Sume and the Sume Video Router docs.