SayGM Review 2026: How It Compares as an OpenRouter Alternative

SayGM is an LLM gateway built on Bittensor subnet 28. One API key reaches the current Claude, GPT and Gemini lines plus a curated set of open-weight models. There is no subscription and no fee on credit top-ups. Prices are capped at the model maker's list price and usually land below it.

OpenRouter passes provider list prices through and charges 5.5 percent on card top-ups. SayGM credits top-ups in full and discounts the token price. To compare like with like, every OpenRouter figure below includes the fee.

What a production workload costs

Percentages hide scale. The table below prices a production workload of 50 million input and 15 million output tokens a month, with no caching discount on either side.

How the price is set

Capacity providers on subnet 28 bid for the right to serve requests. The winning bids set the per-token price, capped at list. SayGM reports an average discount in the low twenties percent across recent epochs. Against list price, our frontier snapshot averages about 21 percent lower, which matches that claim. Against OpenRouter, with its fee, the average is about 25 percent.

SayGM lists about 65 models. That covers every current Claude, GPT and Gemini model plus open-weight picks such as Kimi K3, GLM 5.3 and DeepSeek V4.1 Flash. OpenRouter lists several hundred, including legacy and niche models.

• Frontier models are served through each maker's native API.
• Confidential open models, marked as such, run inside the enclave end to end.
• Cascade models fall back to the next model when a call fails.
• Fusion models combine several models in one call. Neither cascade nor fusion has a direct OpenRouter equivalent.

The SayGM gateway runs in an Intel TDX trusted execution environment. The host operating system and the machine's operators cannot read memory inside it. Attestation evidence covering TCB status, measurements and gateway identity is published and checked by a third-party verifier.

Who can read a prompt

Optional guardrails swap personal data out before a prompt reaches a frontier provider and back in on the reply. That reduces exposure. It does not remove it. For prompts that must stay sealed, use a model marked Confidential. The private inference explainer covers the limits in more detail.

SayGM exposes each model's native API instead of flattening everything into one OpenAI-shaped surface. Anthropic prompt caching, extended thinking and tool use keep working. A conversation stays pinned to one provider, so cached prefixes keep hitting.

Rate limits are set per key and can be raised on request. A desktop app and a CLI are available for non-API use. Setup notes for each tool are in the integrations index.

• Catalogue size. About 65 models. If one model you depend on is missing, you need a second gateway for it.
• Open-weight input prices. OpenRouter's cheapest providers for DeepSeek V4.1 Flash and Kimi K3 are cheaper on input tokens. Those providers are not confidential.
• No free tier. OpenRouter has free models with tight limits. SayGM is pay as you go only.
• Moving prices. Epoch pricing is usually lower but harder to forecast to the dollar than a fixed rate card.

Switch if

• Most of your spend is on Claude, GPT or Gemini.
• You top up often enough that 5.5 percent adds up.
• You need a privacy story that customers or auditors can verify.

Stay on OpenRouter if

• You depend on a long-tail model SayGM does not list.
• Your workload is bulk open-weight inference on public data.
• You rely on free-tier models for prototyping.

Running both is common: SayGM for frontier traffic, OpenRouter for the long tail. The migration checklist covers the code changes and a fallback pattern.