A self-hostable inference marketplace. OpenRouter without the tax — and without the center.
OpenRouter is being acquired by Stripe (Aug 2026, $7B+). Its value was never the routing — it was the single wallet: one balance across every provider, so you never hold N billing relationships. The price of that wallet is a cut off the top, and now a payments company owns it.
freerouter gives you the wallet without the cut, three ways:
- Run it for yourself. Bring your own provider keys, pay providers directly, keep the spread.
- Operate it for others. You hold the wallet for your customers; they top up, you route, you take the margin you set — not the one Stripe sets for you.
- Hand it to anyone. Distributed as a hoistable recipe, so anyone stands up their own marketplace in their own session and grades that it works.
OpenRouter and Stripe are one wallet at the root. freerouter's infinitely nested tenant meter lets your customer resell to their customers, who resell to theirs, each a metered sub-wallet in the same tree. And because the whole thing is hoistable, anyone can instantiate a new root. There is no center to acquire. That is the part a payments company cannot buy out from under you.
freerouter is deliberately not a monolith. It owns two things — the inference product and, since the 2026-08-21 subsumption, the metering library it runs on — and leans on the rest of the portfolio for what those don't cover.
| Layer | Where it lives | Owns |
|---|---|---|
| Metering | metering/ (in-repo library) |
infinitely-nested tenancy + metering of anything meterable — an isolated, extraction-ready module, the seed of forge 2.0 |
| Inference | freerouter | the marketplace UX, provider routing, the OpenAI-compatible product surface |
| Enterprise | enterprise_ai_framework | utilization monitoring, use-case tooling, training-data capture — consumes freerouter, reimplements neither |
| Distribution | hoistable | packages freerouter as a self-installing, self-grading recipe |
freerouter owns its meter: the metering capability lives in-repo as the isolated metering/
library, driven behind an internal seam — no external metering service to call and no external forge
module linked (the dependency is severed). The library is kept extraction-clean so it can later
graduate into forge 2.0, a pure infinitely-nested-tenant meter; forge itself remains a separate
live repo. freerouter is the storefront and the router in front of that meter.
freerouter is a single pure-Go binary. With zero configuration it comes up as a real, durable
personal metered gateway on http://localhost:8080 — local SQLite meter, an OpenAI-compatible
surface, and clean-degrade for every provider and payment feature you have not configured.
docker compose up # builds the image, keeps the meter on a named volume
# or
make run # build + run the binary locally
# or
go run ./cmd/freeroutercurl -s -o /dev/null -w '%{http_code}\n' http://localhost:8080/healthz # -> 200Then grow from a personal gateway toward an operated marketplace one env var at a time — storage
backend, inference providers, operator economics, payment. The full walkthrough is in
docs/self-host.md.
Feature-complete two-sided marketplace, running end-to-end on durable storage. Metering lives
in-repo (the isolated, extraction-ready metering/ library); the external forge dependency is
severed — the build is reproducible off-machine. Payment-in (Polar checkout + webhook), provider
payouts, the model catalog, provider self-signup, and real provider backends (DeepInfra, AWS
Bedrock) are all built, behind clean-degrade config. Released as v0.3.0.
Payment go-live (real Polar credentials, real charges/payouts) and standing up a public prod deployment are externally visible / spend-committing and are reserved to the operator. The code is built and tested up to that line; flipping it live is a deliberate decision, not a default.
Architecture is locked (see CLAUDE.md and docs/design/design.md); the build program is tracked
in rd.
freerouter is licensed under the GNU Lesser General Public License, version 2.1 — see
LICENSE (SPDX-License-Identifier: LGPL-2.1-or-later).
Weak copyleft by intent: improvements to freerouter's own code flow back to everyone, but building on, integrating, or deploying it puts no license obligation on your code — no permissive rug-pull for a proprietary capture, no full-GPL reach into users.
Third Division Labs.