Expense management platform Ramp has made public Router, the AI inference routing service it has used internally for three years. The launch, available exclusively in the United States as of August 20, positions Ramp as a new strategic player in the LLM gateway market, following Stripe's reported acquisition talks for OpenRouter.

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A single API across eight model providers

Through Router's technical documentation, companies can access a single endpoint that automatically routes requests to models from OpenAI, Anthropic, DeepSeek, Moonshot, Minimax, Nvidia, xAI, and Z.ai. The system supports Bring Your Own Key (BYOK) for select providers, allowing businesses to maintain direct contracts with AI labs while benefiting from centralized routing logic. Unlike OpenRouter, which offers a catalog of over 400 models from more than 80 providers, Router focuses on a curated set of eight major vendors.

Benchmark-based routing strategies

The service's added value lies in its "strategies": users can define up to three specific benchmarks for the system to select the most suitable model, or set a preference toward providers' flexible usage tiers. It is also possible to route only complex queries to expensive models, optimizing the cost-performance ratio. An integrated dashboard monitors token spend, total costs, latency, and fallback attempts in real time.

One-year data retention as default

A critical aspect concerns privacy: Router adopts an opt-out data retention policy, recording inputs, outputs, and tool calls for one year by default. Ramp states that it removes personally identifiable information before using such content to improve the product, a different approach from the Zero Data Retention adopted by some competitors. The service is free for the remainder of 2026, with a $26 launch credit, while inference costs remain the user's responsibility. The move allows Ramp, valued at $44 billion after a $750 million round closed in June, to integrate AI cost management with its core business.