Same model, different price: choose how your requests are routed

Most models on OpenUncensored are served by more than one provider. The model is the same and so are the weights, but each provider sets its own price and runs at its own speed. Until today you had no say in which one answered. Now you do, and the default got cheaper.

In short:

• Every model page now shows each provider's input, output and cached input price, plus its live speed.
• By default we send your request to the cheapest provider that produces at least 150 tokens per second.
• You can choose lowest latency, fastest output or lowest cost instead, for a single request or for everything your key sends.
• You still pay exactly the provider's price, with no markup, and every response tells you which provider answered.

Same model, different prices

Here is DeepSeek V4.1 Flash 1017 Uncensored on two of its hosts, in dollars per million tokens:

	Input	Output	Cached input
Host 1	$0.33	$1.32	$0.00825
Host 2	$0.40	$1.40	$0.04

Input and output are within about 20% of each other. Cached input is five times apart, and for most of our traffic that is the column that decides the bill.

Why cached tokens decide the bill

A provider keeps the start of recent prompts in memory. When the next request begins with the same text, those tokens are a cache hit, and providers charge much less for them.

Coding agents such as Claude Code, Codex and opencode resend the whole conversation on every step: the system prompt, the tool definitions, every file they have read. On our traffic, 96 to 99% of agent prompt tokens are cache hits. Take one agent step with a 30,000 token prompt (97% cached) and a 500 token answer:

	Fresh input	Cached input	Output	Total
Host 1	$0.0003	$0.0002	$0.0007	$0.0012
Host 2	$0.0004	$0.0012	$0.0007	$0.0022

Same model, same answer, nearly twice the price. Over a day of agent work that is real money. Judged by the input price alone, the two hosts look almost the same.

What the default does now

When you don't ask for anything:

1. Providers that run the model on their own hardware go before resellers.
2. Among those, every provider averaging 150 tokens per second or more counts as fast enough, and the cheapest goes first. The price is worked out for your request, counting the share of cached tokens the model usually gets.
3. Slower providers come after, as fallbacks.
4. If a provider fails before it has sent anything, the next one answers.

150 tokens per second is faster than anyone reads and quick enough for agent loops. Above that line, a faster provider buys you little and can cost you a lot. Below it, speed matters more than price.

Choose your own

Strategy	Picks first	Use it for
default (or quality)	The cheapest provider over 150 tok/s	Almost everything
speed (or latency)	Fastest time to first token	Chat and voice, where waiting for the first word hurts
throughput	Most tokens per second	Long answers and batch jobs
cost (or price)	Lowest price, counting cached tokens	Background work where a slower answer is fine
random	Shuffled	Spreading load and A/B tests

For one request, add a routing field:

curl https://api.openuncensored.com/v1/chat/completions \
  -H "Authorization: Bearer $OU_API_KEY" \
  -H "Content-Type: application/json" \
  -d '{"model": "deepseek-v4.1-flash-1017-uncensored",
       "messages": [{"role": "user", "content": "hello"}],
       "routing": {"strategy": "cost"}}'

Or send the header X-OU-Strategy: cost, which helps when your client can't add body fields. Clients written for OpenRouter work as they are: "provider": {"sort": "price"} (or "throughput" or "latency") maps onto the same strategies.

For your whole key, open the credits page, enter your key and pick one. Every request from that key then uses it, unless the request asks for something else. It takes effect within 30 seconds.

What you'll be billed

You pay the price of the provider that answered, with no markup. Every response says which one it was:

• the ou.provider field in the response body and the X-OU-Provider header
• usage, with cache hits in prompt_tokens_details.cached_tokens where the provider reports them

Each provider's prices and live speed are on its model's page, for example DeepSeek V4.1 Flash 1017 Uncensored.

Caveats

• Speeds are live averages over each provider's recent requests, and they move through the day. A provider we have not measured yet counts as fast enough, so it gets tried, and it drops back if it turns out slower.
• Switching providers can cost you cache hits. Each provider only has a cache of the prompts it has seen. Changing strategy partway through an agent session can make the next few requests fully priced until the new provider has cached your context.
• A fallback can cost more. If the cheapest provider fails, the next one answers at its own price. Set "allow_fallbacks": false if you'd rather get the error.
• The pricing on /v1/models is the cheapest provider's list price. The per-provider prices, including cached input, are in each model's providers list.
• When a provider reports its own charge, that is what we bill, cache discount included. Otherwise we work it out from the provider's listed prices.

Full details are in the routing docs.