Market Share on OpenRouter and Vercel by What Matters: Gold
I've seen many charts showing, in tokens, the inexorable rise of new models as the former leaders' share tumbles.
Yet very little about who is getting all the revenue, let alone the profits.
I started scraping OpenRouter to get a view on this.
I matched daily token volumes to OpenRouter's weighted billed prices and to the input/output ratios on each model page. Add up the revenue of all the models of all the labs... and you see who is making money. The list-price basis runs from 26 March, per-model token capture from 5 April, and the billed basis from 12 June.
Meanwhile, Vercel kindly gives its spend share away for free, back to October 2025, but with fewer dimensions to it.
The customers of neither firm represent the wider AI market. They are a step below enterprise, where most of the money probably sits.
In particular, devs use OpenRouter because they do not want to be stuck with just one provider. OpenRouter allows you to switch models on a sixpence for better performance or lower cost. Unrepresentative of most users, but that is the point.
This brutal daily knife fight tells us each day who is winning.
Let's get into it.
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01
Share of billed dollars, 12 June to 8 September 2026. Daily leadership from 26 March on the list-price basis.
02
03
Anthropic's OpenRouter dollar share fell from 60% to 32% over the summer as OpenAI cut its prices and the Chinese labs launched. It is still 1.8 times the runner-up's share, and on Vercel it has held above 60% of spend in every month since April.
04
Since April the Chinese labs' share of OpenRouter tokens rose from 47% to 63%, and free variants carried 25% of all tokens in the peak week.
And the latest models are damn good, matching Anthropic on a number of benchmarks.
Anthropic held its list price throughout. $5 / $25. Token share fell, but still took 47% of the money.
05
What each lab actually collects per million tokens, after caching and discounts. Anthropic realises $1.42; the rest of the market combined realises $0.18. Anthropic's rate card has not moved in 10 months, and four of the seven biggest models by spend on Vercel are Claude.
06
The week of 13 July, before the 80% Luna cut, against the week of 31 August. Dollars flat, 4.5 times the tokens to serve them.
07
Llama and Grok are talked about as the challengers. OpenRouter's customers do not route to them: Meta has never reached 1% of dollars, xAI is 2%. On Vercel, Meta is 0.1% of spend and xAI records none. Share of dollars by lab, the big three removed.