How to Configure OpenRouter Model Routing
OpenRouter acts as a unified gateway to multiple LLM providers and models, enabling intelligent routing based on task complexity. By configuring OpenRouter with OpenClaw, you can automatically send simple tasks to Claude Haiku, complex reasoning to Claude Opus, and everything else to Sonnet โ cutting costs by 50-70% while maintaining quality.
Why This Is Hard to Do Yourself
These are the common pitfalls that trip people up.
Manual model selection
Without routing, you manually pick a model for each task or default to one expensive option
Task complexity detection
How do you know which model to use for each request? Pattern matching is brittle and hard to maintain
Fallback complexity
If your primary model is rate-limited or down, requests fail. Setting up fallbacks manually is tedious
Hidden cost drains
Simple formatting and summarization tasks sent to Opus waste 50x the tokens they should
Step-by-Step Guide
Sign up for OpenRouter
Create an account and get your API key.
Configure OpenRouter in OpenClaw
Set up the OpenRouter provider.
Define routing rules
Set up pattern-based model routing.
Warning: Routing patterns are regex-based and evaluated in order. Put more specific patterns first to avoid them being caught by broader ones.
Set up fallback models
Handle rate limits and outages gracefully.
Test routing with sample prompts
Verify models are routing correctly.
Monitor routing decisions and costs
Track which models handle which requests.
Get Expert Routing Configuration
Routing rules that are too aggressive hurt quality. Rules that are too conservative waste money. Our experts analyze your actual usage patterns and configure optimal routing that balances cost and performance.
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