The three names
This is the part worth reading carefully, because a model has three names and they do different jobs.
The gateway name is built from the provider name and an alias you choose. If
you leave the API name blank, the alias is sent upstream as well.
Set the API name when the provider’s own identifier is something you would
rather not expose. A model that upstream calls
nvidia/nemotron-nano-9b-v2 can be openrouter/nemotron to everything you run.
The gateway name is the only name accepted from a client. The provider’s own
identifier does not work from outside, so nothing you run can reach a model
you did not deliberately expose.
Automatic models
Adding a model to an automatic provider means picking it from the catalog. Everything factual about it, the context window, the costs, whether it can see images or call tools, is read live from models.dev on every page load. You can still rename it. The edit form’s gateway name field changes the public name without touching what is sent upstream. If a model leaves the catalog or is deprecated, it is disabled automatically and labelled, so it stops counting against your plan once you delete it.Custom models
For a custom provider you describe the model yourself, across three tabs. General is the names, the type and the display name. Types are chat, embedding, moderation, vision, audio and image. Pricing is costs per million tokens for input and output, optional cache read and write costs, an optional higher rate above a context threshold, and per image or per minute costs for those model types. Also the context window and the maximum output. Configuration is what the model can do: attachments, reasoning and tool calling, plus how reasoning and speed should be expressed upstream.Reasoning style
Different providers ask for reasoning effort in different ways. Left on automatic, nemu infers it from the model. Set it explicitly when the guess is wrong.
Effort runs low, medium, high, xhigh and max, clamped to what each model
actually supports.
Speed mode does the same for the fast toggle, either Anthropic’s fast mode
or OpenAI’s priority service tier.
Two names that always work
auto picks the cheapest enabled chat or vision model in the workspace.
A suffix in square brackets is a variant. openrouter/nemotron[1m] addresses
the same model with a one million token context window.