OpenRouter vs ShareQuota
A hosted marketplace with nothing to install, beside a local binary with nothing to pay. They are not really rivals — one of ShareQuota’s five providers is OpenRouter — but people compare them, so here it is.
OpenRouter is a hosted service that sells API credits: you pay per token, and one OpenAI-compatible key reaches more than four hundred models across every major lab, with nothing to run. ShareQuota is a free, MIT-licensed router that runs on your own machine, signs in to the Claude Pro, ChatGPT Plus and Gemini plans you already pay for, and pools them with API keys behind one local endpoint — and it can route to OpenRouter itself for the models the four other providers do not carry. The question is not which is better; it is whether you want to spend money on tokens or the plan you already have.
Side by side
Eleven facts, read from each project’s own repository and site on 2026-09-13. Where a row favours the other tool, the row says so.
| Fact | ShareQuota | OpenRouter |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub stars | — | Not applicable |
| Written in | Go | Not applicable |
| Licence | MIT | Not applicable |
| What you run | One static binary | Hosted service |
| Providers reached | 5 | 400+ models |
| Signs in to a subscription plan | Yes | No |
| Client dialects served | Anthropic, OpenAI, Responses, Gemini | OpenAI |
| Coding tools named as supported | Claude Code, Codex, Gemini CLI, Cursor, Cline, Copilot | Any OpenAI-compatible client |
| Built as a shared team gateway | No | Yes |
| Token compression built in | No | No |
| Runs on your machine, no service between | Yes | No |
Star counts are rounded down to the hundred. ShareQuota’s repository is public but new, and its count is not yet a fact worth printing.
Which one, for what
Pick OpenRouter when
- You want 400+ models and no process to run, and paying per token is fine.
- Your workload runs on a server you do not control, where a local binary cannot live.
- You need a model that none of the Claude, ChatGPT, Gemini or DeepSeek accounts you own can serve.
Pick ShareQuota when
- You already pay for Claude Pro, ChatGPT Plus or a Gemini plan and want it to answer your tools.
- Your API keys should stay in a file on your disk, not in a third party’s account.
- You want OpenRouter as the fallback, not the front door — it is one of the five providers.
Questions about the pair
Yes — it is one of the five providers. Add your OpenRouter API key in the dashboard and route with the or/ prefix, or send any slash-carrying model id and it lands there. The point of the pairing is to spend your subscription first and your credits second.
No. OpenRouter sells API credits and cannot take a subscription login. That is the one job ShareQuota exists to do — the OAuth sign-in to a plan you hold, on your own machine.
ShareQuota is free and pools plans you already pay for; OpenRouter charges per token at each model’s list price. For someone with a plan whose quota goes unused, ShareQuota costs nothing extra. For someone with no plan and light usage, OpenRouter’s credits may be cheaper than any subscription.