Requesty alternatives: the same coding month at list plus 5% and under list

A Requesty alternative is worth a look when the 5% on every request is the line you want gone. Requesty bills each provider's cost plus 5% (its pricing page, read 2026-10-22), so a steady month of 3,000 Claude Sonnet 5.5 coding turns that costs $81.00 at Anthropic's list price is $85.05 there. The same month is $38.80 here, from the live catalog on 2026-10-22.

Keep Requesty if you need EU data residency on every plan, routing policies or its MCP Gateway. Pick OpenRouter for the largest model list, LiteLLM or Portkey to run a gateway over keys you already hold, and UplinkSwitch, an AI API gateway, for Claude and GPT coding models under the developer's list price. The full field is in eight gateways ranked by the fee on top; this page prices one Cline, Zoo Code or OpenCode month on each.

The rows fall into three bands. Requesty, OpenRouter and Cloudflare's Unified Billing add 5% to 5.5% to the list price. Vercel, LiteLLM and Portkey keep the provider's token price, and the gateway costs you a card fee, a server or a plan. UplinkSwitch prices under list and charges nothing on the top-up.

Portkey has belonged to Palo Alto Networks since 2026-05-29 (its press release). The Portkey alternatives page dates that change and prices a month on its plan. The hosted LiteLLM alternative covers what running the proxy yourself involves in 2026, and OpenRouter vs LiteLLM works out when a server costs less than a 5.5% fee.

One turn is 80,000 cached input tokens, 2,000 new input tokens and 1,500 output tokens. That is a coding agent late in a session, re-sending its context from the prompt cache, and it is the shape the Claude Code pricing post uses. A steady day is 150 turns and a month is 20 working days, 3,000 turns in all.

On Claude Sonnet 5.5 the month is $85.05 on Requesty and $38.80 here. Requesty's 5% is $4.05 of that bill. The rest of the gap is the token rate: Sonnet 5.5 is $1.20 in, $0.075 cached and $3.00 out per million tokens here, against Anthropic's $2.00, $0.10 and $10.00.

Coding agents re-send the conversation on every turn, so 80,000 of the 83,500 tokens in a turn bill at the cached rate. A gateway that adds a percentage to list adds it to the cached tokens too. The list prices come from Anthropic's pricing page and OpenAI's pricing page, the baseline every gateway above starts from.

Roo Code shut down on 2026-05-15, and its Marketplace listing points to Zoo Code, the community fork; the Zoo Code guide has the dates. Zoo Code, Cline and OpenCode send the same kind of turn, so the table holds for each of them.

Two of our rows can be replayed by anyone. The canary prompt behind the daily real-model check is public JSON at GET https://api.uplinkswitch.com/v1/proof, so the same prompt can go to the developer's own API and the input token counts can be compared. A receipt from any answer verifies at statements/verify in the browser, with no account.

Requesty vs OpenRouter comes down to where the fee lands. Both bill inference at the provider's list price. Requesty adds 5% to the model cost of each request. OpenRouter adds 5.5% when you buy credit (8% on Business), with a $0.80 minimum and 5% on crypto (its FAQ, read 2026-10-22). On the steady Sonnet 5.5 month that is $85.05 on Requesty and $85.46 on OpenRouter, $0.41 apart.

On small top-ups the minimum decides. $10 of OpenRouter credit costs $10.80, 8% on top, while Requesty adds 50 cents to $10 of usage. At $14.55 a top-up and above, OpenRouter's fee is a flat 5.5%. OpenRouter refunds unused credit for 24 hours after a purchase, keeps the platform fee, and may expire unused credit a year after purchase.

Beyond price, OpenRouter lists 500+ models from 80+ providers on its pricing page, lets each request pick or order providers, and routes in-region on Business through eu.openrouter.ai. Requesty keeps EU data residency on every plan, adds routing policies and an MCP Gateway, and puts SSO and audit logs on Enterprise. The OpenRouter pricing explainer works the fee at every top-up size, and UplinkSwitch vs OpenRouter puts our terms next to OpenRouter's row by row.

• EU data residency on every plan, the free one included. Its FAQ says traffic, logs and analytics stay in EU-based infrastructure by default.
• Routing policies, caching and fallbacks you set yourself, plus an MCP Gateway and advanced observability on pay as you go.
• Enterprise identity and policy: SSO with Okta, Azure AD, Google Workspace or custom OIDC, full RBAC, audit logs, approved-model lists, guardrails and PII detection.
• 600+ models on one bill, with your own provider keys beside them.
• A free plan on free models, 200 requests a day, with no card.
• Invoices paid by ACH or wire on Enterprise.

• The same coding models under list: 58 of the 75 chat models with a list price sit under it on input and output, from the live catalog, and the steady Sonnet 5.5 month is $46.25 less than on Requesty.
• No fee on top-ups, prepaid from $10 with no subscription, and a 30-day price lock on each top-up.
• Proof that the model answering is the one named: the daily real-model check publishes a verdict per model (230 of 269 stable at the last run).
• Signed records: a receipt on every non-streamed answer and a signed monthly statement, verified in the browser at statements/verify.
• Spend control per key: a monthly limit, budget autopilot that steps the key down to a cheaper model near it, rate limits and a model allowlist.
• Claude Code in the Anthropic format at the same price as the OpenAI format, with the uncensored builds and 96 media models on the same balance.

Change the base URL and the key; nothing else in the tool moves. The OpenAI SDK and most agents read these two variables:

export OPENAI_BASE_URL="https://api.uplinkswitch.com/v1"
export OPENAI_API_KEY="sk-uplink-live-..."

One line per tool, each with a guide on this site:

# Cline, and Zoo Code (the fork of Roo Code): API Provider "OpenAI Compatible",
#   Base URL https://api.uplinkswitch.com/v1, API Key sk-uplink-live-..., one model id
# Kilo Code: provider "OpenAI Compatible", base URL https://api.uplinkswitch.com/v1
# OpenCode: a provider block in opencode.json with "npm": "@ai-sdk/openai-compatible"
#   and "baseURL": "https://api.uplinkswitch.com/v1"

# Claude Code (Anthropic format, Claude ids)
export ANTHROPIC_BASE_URL="https://api.uplinkswitch.com/v1"
export ANTHROPIC_AUTH_TOKEN="sk-uplink-live-..."

Model ids are the ones on the Models page, such as claude-sonnet-5-5 or glm-5.3; copy them rather than typing them. A key per tool keeps each tool's spend apart on the Usage page, and a monthly limit on each key stops a runaway agent at the number you set.

Guides: Cline setup, Zoo Code and Roo Code, OpenCode with one key and Kilo Code API key. Every chat model's rate next to its list price is in the price index.

What is the best Requesty alternative?

It depends on what Requesty does for you. For the largest model list and per-request provider choice, OpenRouter. For a gateway inside your own network, self-hosted LiteLLM. For logs, caching and limits over provider keys you already hold, Cloudflare AI Gateway or Portkey. For the same coding models at a lower token rate, UplinkSwitch: the steady Claude Sonnet 5.5 month on this page is $85.05 on Requesty and $38.80 here (live catalog, 2026-10-22).

Is Requesty cheaper than OpenRouter?

By half a point on the same list price. Requesty adds 5% to model cost and OpenRouter adds 5.5% to each credit purchase, so $1,000 of list-price usage is $1,050.00 on Requesty and $1,055.00 on OpenRouter. Below a $14.55 top-up, OpenRouter's $0.80 minimum costs more: $10 of credit is $10.80. Both pricing pages were read 2026-10-22.

Does Requesty have a free tier?

Yes. Its free plan runs the platform on free models, with routing, caching, fallbacks, analytics and EU data residency, capped at 200 requests a day and with no card (its pricing page, read 2026-10-22). Paid models need pay as you go at 5% on model cost. UplinkSwitch starts at a $20 top-up with no subscription, and every model bills per token from that balance.

What does Requesty charge on top of the model price?

5% of the provider's cost. Its pricing FAQ gives the example: a model at $10 per million tokens costs $10.50 per million through Requesty. There is no per-seat price and no minimum spend, and Enterprise adds SSO, RBAC and custom SLAs on request (read 2026-10-22).

Which Requesty alternative keeps EU data residency?

Requesty keeps it on every plan: its FAQ says traffic, logs and analytics stay in EU-based infrastructure by default. OpenRouter routes in-region on its Business and Enterprise plans through eu.openrouter.ai. A self-hosted LiteLLM proxy stays wherever you run it; its FAQ says your data and keys never leave your own infrastructure. All three pages were read 2026-10-22.

Can I use a Requesty alternative in Roo Code or OpenCode?

Yes, with any gateway that serves an OpenAI-compatible base URL. Roo Code itself shut down on 2026-05-15; Zoo Code, its community fork, and Cline both take the OpenAI Compatible provider with a base URL, a key and a model id. OpenCode takes a provider block in opencode.json with @ai-sdk/openai-compatible and the base URL https://api.uplinkswitch.com/v1. The Zoo Code, Cline and OpenCode guides on this site have every field.

Requesty, OpenRouter, LiteLLM, Portkey, Palo Alto Networks, Cloudflare, Vercel, Roo Code, Zoo Code, Cline and OpenCode are trademarks of their owners. This page quotes Requesty's pricing page and FAQ, OpenRouter's pricing page and FAQ, and the LiteLLM and Portkey pricing pages as read on 2026-10-22, and Cloudflare's and Vercel's pricing docs as read on 2026-10-19. Our figures come from GET https://api.uplinkswitch.com/v1/catalog, GET https://api.uplinkswitch.com/v1/proof and the terms. Get a key: prepaid from $10, no subscription, 30-day price lock, in the console.