The European alternative to OpenRouter

Why do teams in the EU leave OpenRouter?

Because an EU endpoint doesn't make OpenRouter European. OpenRouter, Inc. is based in New York and its terms are governed by New York law. US law follows US companies, not servers: the CLOUD Act obliges a US provider to hand over data in its possession, custody or control, wherever that data is stored (18 U.S.C. § 2713). For a European company that sends contracts, code or customer data through an AI router, that is a strategic risk, not a technicality.

OpenRouter's own pages, checked on 27 October 2026, show where the gaps are:

• EU-only routing is an upgrade. It means sending requests to eu.openrouter.ai, which is included on the Business and Enterprise plans only (OpenRouter pricing). On Free and Standard, OpenRouter load-balances requests across providers worldwide and prioritises price (provider routing).
• Part of your data still goes to the US. Account data, billing records, authentication data, security logs and abuse-monitoring metadata may be stored or processed in the US, even on the EU endpoint (in-region routing). OpenRouter's privacy policy relies on Standard Contractual Clauses for those transfers.
• The router runs on a US cloud. OpenRouter's DPA lists Google Cloud Platform in US regions; only payloads sent to the EU API are processed in the EU or EEA.
• EU-hosted is not EU-owned. Three of the five providers in OpenRouter's EU region are US companies: Amazon Bedrock, Azure and Google. Its routing docs offer no filter on provider ownership.

EUrouter answers each of these the other way around. EUrouter B.V. is an Amsterdam company under Dutch law. The router runs on Scaleway in Amsterdam, every plan routes only to EU-hosted providers, and prompts, completions and API metadata are processed only in the EEA (EUrouter DPA, section 5).

What do you get with EUrouter?

EUrouter is a European AI router you don't have to configure into compliance: a European company, European infrastructure and European providers, on every plan.

EU-only on every plan, Free included

Every EUrouter request goes only to EU-hosted provider endpoints, from the first request on the Free plan. There is no special endpoint to remember and no plan to upgrade to. When a provider is down, EUrouter falls back to another EU-hosted provider of the same model; your request never leaves Europe to stay online.

European companies all the way down

Of the 17 providers in the EUrouter catalog, 15 are headquartered in the EU, among them Mistral AI, Scaleway, OVHcloud, IONOS and Nebul (providers). AWS Bedrock and Microsoft Foundry serve GPT and Claude models from EU regions. When your policy asks for European companies only, set eu_owned: true on a request, or once for your whole account as a routing rule, and those two are excluded (routing docs).

No prompts stored

EUrouter doesn't store the content of requests or responses after a request completes; it keeps only metadata such as timestamps, model identifiers and token counts for billing (EUrouter DPA, section 10). All 17 providers are listed with no prompt retention and no training.

More models in Europe than OpenRouter's EU region

On 27 October 2026, EUrouter served 154 models from the EU, against 67 on OpenRouter's EU domain. The tables below read the live EUrouter catalog, so models, prices and providers are always current.

OpenAI and Anthropic models, served from EU regions:

Mistral models on European providers:

Every model, with its providers and prices, is in the EUrouter model catalog.

How do you switch from OpenRouter to EUrouter?

Switching from OpenRouter to EUrouter takes two changes in an OpenAI SDK client: the base URL becomes https://api.eurouter.ai/api/v1 and the API key becomes an EUrouter key. Message formats, streaming, tool calls and OpenRouter's provider routing object carry over.

1. Create a free account at EUrouter sign-up and create a key under API Keys in the dashboard. EUrouter keys start with eur_ (quickstart).
2. Replace the base URL and the key in your client, as in the examples below.
3. Check each model ID against the model catalog or GET https://api.eurouter.ai/api/v1/models. EUrouter accepts OpenRouter's lab prefix, so openai/gpt-oss-120b works as written, but some names differ: OpenRouter's anthropic/claude-sonnet-5.5 is claude-sonnet-5-5 on EUrouter.
4. Keep your provider settings. order, only, ignore, allow_fallbacks, sort, zdr, data_collection and quantizations work as on OpenRouter (routing docs).
5. Add the European controls your policy asks for: eu_owned, data_residency and max_retention_days.

import os

from openai import OpenAI

client = OpenAI(
    base_url="https://api.eurouter.ai/api/v1",
    api_key=os.environ["EUROUTER_API_KEY"],
)

response = client.chat.completions.create(
    model="mistral-large-3",
    messages=[{"role": "user", "content": "Name three EU member states."}],
    extra_body={"provider": {"eu_owned": True, "zdr": True}},
)

print(response.choices[0].message.content)

The same request without an SDK:

curl https://api.eurouter.ai/api/v1/chat/completions \
  -H "Authorization: Bearer $EUROUTER_API_KEY" \
  -H "Content-Type: application/json" \
  -d '{
    "model": "mistral-large-3",
    "messages": [{"role": "user", "content": "Name three EU member states."}],
    "provider": {"eu_owned": true, "zdr": true}
  }'

What other European options are there?

Besides EUrouter, three other routes keep your AI in Europe:

• Cortecs (Vienna, Austria): an LLM router whose Sovereign Cloud option uses only providers established in the EU (cortecs.ai).
• Eden AI (France): a unified AI API with an EU endpoint where only the models that meet EU residency requirements are available (Eden AI EU endpoint).
• LiteLLM, self-hosted: an MIT-licensed gateway you run in your own EU cloud account, holding every provider contract yourself (LiteLLM docs).

If your workload has no European requirement and you want the widest global catalog, OpenRouter's global endpoint is built for that.

Start in Europe today

Create a free account, point your client at https://api.eurouter.ai/api/v1, and your next request runs in Europe. Create a free account, compare plans, or talk to us about your DPA review.