OpenRouter vs Beam 1.0

OpenRouter

Public OpenAPI document, llms.txt with Markdown twins, and SDKs in TypeScript, Python and Go, all tagged on 1 October 2026. No machine payment. USDC top-ups go to a prepaid balance.

Beam 1.0

The Reflection API is OpenAI-compatible, with an OpenAPI document, strict structured outputs and tool calls, and error codes that say when to retry, and the weights are Apache-2.0. It is a free public beta with unpublished daily limits and no per-token price, reasoning can't be turned off, and three API incidents were posted between 14 and 16 October 2026.

OpenRouter

1. Set provider.data_collection: "deny" or provider.zdr: true when the prompt holds anything private
2. Pass a models list so a failed provider falls through to the next one
3. Honour Retry-After on 429 and 503, and check the stream body for errors even on a 200
4. Set max_price so a routed request can't land on an expensive provider
5. Free models allow 50 requests a day until $10 of credit has been bought. Check GET /api/v1/key for what's left

Beam 1.0

1. Send reasoning_effort low or medium for short tasks. The default is max, and none or minimal return 400 unsupported_value
2. Return every assistant message with its reasoning_content unchanged. If a turn comes back without it, start a new conversation, since later requests fail with missing_required_parameter
3. Don't rely on stop or seed. Both are accepted and ignored, so truncate output in your own code
4. Honour x-should-retry: false on a 429. It means a daily limit is spent and Retry-After counts to 00:00 UTC
5. Set max_completion_tokens yourself on long prompts. The default budget isn't reduced to fit the prompt and includes reasoning tokens