# Cheaper Inference Cheaper Inference (cheaperinference.com) is a discount API gateway for [[Large Language Models (LLMs)]] operated by Keak AI, Inc., a Delaware company. It exposes OpenAI- and Anthropic-compatible endpoints, ranks the eligible provider routes by estimated cost on every request, and starts with the cheapest available. Headline claim: save up to 60%, with market-linked rates never above direct provider list price and no separate routing surcharge. It runs on a prepaid wallet, $5 minimum. What makes it structurally different from [[OpenRouter]] or [[Ramp Router]] is that it is a **meta-aggregator**: its own documentation names OpenRouter and [[Vercel]] AI Gateway as upstream routes. It aggregates aggregators, so a prompt can pass through three custodians before it reaches a model. ## Data handling The privacy policy is better than the category average on the part that usually matters: prompt and response bodies are not stored in its application database, and Keak states it does not use them to train Keak models. Operational metadata is retained (model, endpoint, timestamps, usage, settled charge, key attribution, latency, provider-attempt data), with product and security logs kept around 12 months and billing records up to 7 years. Zero data retention is **opt-in per request** (`data_retention: {"mode": "zero"}`, `zdr: true`, or a header), and switching it on restricts routing to Vercel AI Gateway and OpenRouter routes with server-enforced ZDR. That is a real tension: the ZDR-compliant route set and the cheapest route set are not the same, so the privacy switch works against the reason you came. ## The unexplained part The site never publishes where the discount comes from. The only hint is a seller-side pitch inviting people to "turn unused inference capacity into revenue", which suggests a two-sided capacity marketplace. For open-weight models that is ordinary arbitrage. For closed frontier models like Claude and GPT (both named on the homepage), a sub-list-price route implies resold committed capacity, resold credits, or deliberately sacrificed margin, and none of those is disclosed. That is the general lesson worth keeping: a cost router's savings claim is only as trustworthy as its explanation of where the money comes from. An unexplained discount on a good you cannot legally resell is a question, not a feature. ## Integrations Documented support for [[Claude Code]], [[OpenAI Codex]], [[Cline]], [[Cursor]], [[Aider]], Continue, Open WebUI and LibreChat. The target user is someone running coding agents at volume. ## References - Official website: https://cheaperinference.com/ - Documentation: https://cheaperinference.com/docs - Integrations: https://cheaperinference.com/docs/integrations - Privacy policy: https://cheaperinference.com/privacy - Keak subprocessors: https://platform.keak.com/subprocessors ## Related - [[OpenRouter]] - [[Ramp Router]] - [[Large Language Models (LLMs)]] - [[AI Inference]] - [[Vercel]] - [[Claude Code]] - [[OpenAI Codex]] - [[Cline]] - [[Cursor]] - [[Aider]]