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October monthly recap

This week - October, in three charts. We just published our first monthly data recap, a full breakdown of what moved on OpenRouter last month. These three are just a taste of the analysis, be sure to read the full October recap for the rest.

Highlights

  • The biggest month yet: 790T tokens ran through OpenRouter in October, up 37% from September and almost 25x from January.
  • Agents are three quarters of the market: Agentic API keys took 76% of October tokens. A year ago they took 8%.
  • Tokens keep getting cheaper: The effective price per token fell 57% for closed-weight models and 70% for open weights since January.

790 trillion tokens in October

Monthly tokens on OpenRouter, January to October 2026.
Monthly tokens on OpenRouter, January to October 2026.

Agents consume 76% of all tokens

Monthly tokens by API key type, September 2025 to October 2026.
Monthly tokens by API key type, September 2025 to October 2026.

Effective price per token fell 57 to 70% since January

Effective price per 1M tokens, January to October 2026.
Effective price per 1M tokens, January to October 2026.

The rest of October

The full recap also covers the open-weight rebound after the late-September closed launches, which labs grew fastest since May, the top model for each task, month-over-month retention by lab, the rise of decision models, and the open-weight provider leaderboard.

Read the full October recap.

Onwards,

Peter

Charts cover January 1 to October 31, 2026 (UTC). Tokens are prompt plus completion. Agentic, mixed and human are classified per API key per month: an agentic score of 0.50 or more is agentic, 0.25 to 0.49 is mixed, below 0.25 is human. Effective price is billed usage over prompt plus completion tokens, excluding free variants, BYOK, stealth models and non-chat APIs.