Hard facts side by side: free tiers, prices, limits, SDKs and privacy. Every value links to the official page it came from and is re-checked every week.
| For chat |  Anthropic (Claude API) |  Perplexity API |  OpenRouter |
|---|---|---|---|
| Free tier | Trial credits New users receive a small amount of free credits to test the API. Source, Nov 15, 2026 | Not listed | Yes 25+ free models, 20 requests/min and 50/day (1,000/day after $10 in credits). Source, Nov 15, 2026 |
| Starting price | $2 per 1M input tokens Claude Sonnet 5.5; $10 per 1M output tokens (Haiku 5.5 from $0.10 input). Source, Nov 15, 2026 |
| $1 per 1,000 fast web searches Pay as you go, no subscription. Model tokens extra, e.g. openai/gpt-6-luna $0.10 in, $0.50 out per 1M. Source, Nov 15, 2026 |
| 5.5% fee on credits Standard pay-as-you-go plan; model usage billed at provider rates. Source, Nov 15, 2026 |
| Rate limit | 4,000 requests/min Start tier, Claude Sonnet 5.5 (2M input, 400K output tokens/min); new orgs may start lower. Source, Nov 15, 2026 | 1 request/s at Tier 0 Agent API, shared across keys. Tier 1 ($50+ credits bought) gets 3 QPS; higher tiers get more. Source, Nov 15, 2026 | 20 requests/min Free (:free) models; 50/day under $10 purchased. No plan limit on paid models. Source, Nov 15, 2026 |
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| Size limit | 1M token context Claude Fable 5.2, Opus 5.5, Sonnet 5.5 and Haiku 5.5; 128K max output. Source, Nov 15, 2026 | Not listed | Not listed |
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| Official SDKs | PythonJavaScript / TypeScript.NETGoJavaPHPRubySource, Nov 15, 2026 | PythonJavaScript / TypeScript | PythonJavaScript / TypeScript |
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| Trains on your data | No Inputs and outputs from the Anthropic API are not used for training by default. Source, Nov 15, 2026 | No API Terms say Customer Content is not used to train models; zero data retention is not the default. Source, Nov 15, 2026 | No OpenRouter doesn't train on inputs/outputs; some providers may. Models that don't train are labeled. Source, Nov 15, 2026 |
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| EU hosting | No Inference geo is only us or global; workspace (storage) geo is only us. Source, Nov 15, 2026 | No Trust Center lists all 23 subprocessors, incl. AWS, Google Cloud and Azure, in the US; no EU region offered. Source, Nov 13, 2026 | Yes EU in-region routing via eu.openrouter.ai on Business and Enterprise plans. Source, Nov 15, 2026 |
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| Compliance | SOC 2ISO 27001HIPAASource, Nov 15, 2026 | SOC 2 SOC 2 Type II report; a 2025 HIPAA gap assessment is listed but is not a certification. Source, Nov 15, 2026 | SOC 2GDPRSource, Nov 15, 2026 |
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Official SDKs for Python 3.10+ and Node.js 20+ (TypeScript).
Wirestack