# OpenRouter rebuilds provider routing to weigh speed and reliability alongside price

> Original title: How we rebuilt provider routing for better, faster inference

- Source: OpenRouter Blog
- Published: 2026-10-28T00:00:00.000Z
- Bad Influence: https://badinfluence.news/items/vvfxp8opnbvyecgj2n1tg5834
- Original: https://openrouter.ai/blog/announcements/how-we-rebuilt-provider-routing/

## Summary

OpenRouter says its new provider routing algorithm picks endpoints by a real-time Routing Cost that combines effective price, waiting time and retry cost. In a one-week switchback experiment over 24 million requests, it cut TTFT p50 by 16.9%, raised throughput p50 by 16.3% and reduced requests hitting a 429 by 67%, at a 6.0% higher cost per K requests.

## Why it matters

The post explains how the router weighs price, latency, throughput and failures together, with a switchback experiment showing the trade-off in cost against speed and reliability.