New Features Reasoning Streams Crypto Invoices End User Ids And More

Using your own provider credentials and allowing backup capacity are separate choices in OpenRouter. Its May 2025 update introduced a setting requiring requests to a particular provider to use your own API key.

The current documentation explains the consequence more precisely: shared-capacity fallback can be blocked for selected models or for an entire provider. Under the provider-wide restriction, a failed or inapplicable key causes that provider to be skipped instead of spending OpenRouter credits on its shared capacity. Other providers can still handle the request unless routing is restricted separately.