AkaRouter launches a flat-rate LLM API gateway priced at $20/month with per-call billing instead of per-token, undercutting Claude Max's $200/month subscription by claiming 20x lower cost for the same models.

What happened: AkaRouter introduced a pay-per-call pricing model for large language model access, with its Pro Plan at $19.99/month offering 2,500 points per month and flat-rate pricing (for example, $0.08 per Opus 4 call regardless of prompt length). The service routes to the same upstream providers (Anthropic, OpenAI, Google) that larger competitors use, accessible through a single API key across all models.

Why it matters: Most LLM APIs charge per token, so a request with a 200,000-token prompt costs 40 times more than a 5,000-token prompt for the same question. AkaRouter's flat per-call model eliminates this variability—100 Opus calls cost $8 whether prompts are short or long—which removes what the service calls 'token anxiety' and makes costs fully predictable month to month.

What to watch: AkaRouter's Ultra Plan at $99.99/month includes access to GPT-5.5 and Claude Opus 4.8, with a 60 RPM (requests per minute) rate limit. Signup includes 100 free points on 1-point models with a 10/day cap and no credit card required. Support is available via Telegram group t.me/akarouter_support rather than email.