OpenRouter's request count grew 33-fold in under two years

A case study published by ClickHouse gives rare numbers on how much traffic flows through OpenRouter, the gateway that routes developers' requests to more than 500 models across over 80 providers. From November 2024, when OpenRouter adopted ClickHouse Cloud, to August 2026, monthly requests grew from about 600 million to 19.7 billion, a 33-fold increase. OpenRouter now serves more than 110 trillion tokens a week, and its raw generation log holds roughly 134 billion rows.

The daily figure depends on where you read. The headline speaks of 740 million requests a day; the body says OpenRouter handles over 1 billion every day; 19.7 billion in August works out to roughly 640 million a day. The likely reading is a fast-growing number quoted at different moments, but the post does not reconcile them.

The architecture is simple in principle: write once, roll up many ways. Request telemetry lands in raw tables, and materialized views turn it into rollups for activity, endpoint health and task types, with a dbt and Airflow warehouse on top. The same data serves customer usage charts, public model rankings, internal tools and routing itself: since February 2025, routing has read endpoint health from the store, and the outcomes of routing decisions are written back, closing the loop.

The detail most relevant beyond databases is who queries it. OpenRouter runs dozens of internal agents, mostly through Slack, and its warehouse of around 270 dbt models has every column documented because, in the words of its senior data engineer Joe Ciesielski, the data is accessed primarily through agents. Each agent gets the documentation and a few skills written as markdown files. This is a vendor case study, and every number in it comes from OpenRouter via ClickHouse.