Ramp is making a serious play for the AI inference tollbooth business. The expense management company launched Router on Wednesday evening, a model routing service that lets developers switch between large language models from OpenAI, Anthropic, DeepSeek, Moonshot, Minimax, Nvidia, xAI, and Z.ai through a single API. The service is free to use through the end of 2026 — users only pay underlying inference costs — and comes with a $26 launch credit. Ramp hasn’t said what pricing looks like after that.
The company has been dogfooding this router internally for three years, which gives the launch some credibility that a from-scratch competitor wouldn’t have. Router’s feature set includes routing strategies that let users prioritize flex usage tiers, select models based on up to three user-specified benchmarks, or send only difficult problems to expensive models. A dashboard tracks token spend, cost, latency, and fallback attempts. It’s a direct shot at OpenRouter, though Ramp’s model catalog is considerably smaller at launch.
One detail that deserves scrutiny: Router records model inputs, outputs, and tool calls for one year by default. Ramp says it strips personally identifiable information before using that data to improve the product, and the policy is opt-out, not opt-in. For companies handling sensitive financial data through Ramp’s existing expense platform, that default data retention posture could be a dealbreaker — or at minimum a reason to read the fine print before routing production traffic.
The strategic logic here is hard to miss. Ramp already offers AI token usage monitoring and token spend management to its corporate clients, so Router slots neatly into that stack. The company raised $750 million at a $44 billion valuation in June, and this move gives it a new entry point to sell expense management products to AI-native companies. If Router becomes a testing ground for model comparison the way OpenRouter has, Ramp could also build relationships with AI labs and inference providers that pay off well beyond the routing fees themselves. The service is currently US-only.
