A gateway paying ten percent back on open models has published its own margin
Straitly returns 5 percent of spend on closed-source tokens and 10 percent on open-source, and the gap between those two numbers is the most useful thing on the page.
A new inference gateway is paying people to use open-weight models, and in doing so has published something nobody else in the business publishes: its own margin.
Straitly went live on 9 September 2026 with cashback on token usage. Five percent back on closed-source models, ten percent on open-source, across 177 models behind one OpenAI-compatible endpoint, prepaid from $5 with no subscription. The cashback lands in a separate wallet and can be spent as credits or withdrawn as money.
Ignore the offer. Look at the ratio.
A router can only give back what it makes
Nobody rebates a loss. Paying double on open weights says, roughly, that the margin on open models is at least twice the margin on closed ones. Which is exactly what you would expect: open weights are served by a crowd of interchangeable providers competing on price, and closed models come from one seller with a published rate card and no room underneath it. Five percent on a frontier model is probably close to the whole spread, which would explain why it is not six.
So the cashback table is a margin table with the labels changed. We have not seen another gateway publish one. Perhaps none of them wanted to.
The strongest objection is that none of this is margin
A launch rebate can just as easily be somebody's seed round being handed back to early users, in which case the five-and-ten split says nothing about unit economics and everything about which models a new gateway wants to be known for. Routers live or die on developer habit, and open-weight traffic is the segment where a newcomer can plausibly win, so paying double there is a sensible way to buy the users you can actually keep.
That reading is probably half right, and it does not rescue the closed-source number. You can subsidise beyond your margin for a while, but you cannot do it in a fixed published ratio without knowing what the margin is, and the ratio is the thing on the homepage. Somebody sat down and worked out how much of each spread they could afford to return. What they printed is that answer.
The comparison table is unusually honest and still misleading
On a $100 basis, Straitly cashback is 5 dollars and OpenRouter's standard card credit-purchase fee is $5.50. Both charge for usage. This compares cashback with purchase fees, not total model prices.
A company that sets a rival's card-processing fee against its own rebate, and then writes the caveat itself in the same block, is doing something rarer than most comparison tables manage. It is still a comparison you should not lean on. Model prices are where the money actually is — per million tokens, across 177 models, none of them shown side by side — and those are not being compared at all.
The withdrawable wallet is the part we would watch. Most credit schemes are deliberately not cash, because non-withdrawable credit is a discount and withdrawable credit is a liability sitting on a balance sheet. Straitly has chosen the expensive version, which is a real commitment and an unusual one for a startup routing other people's models. It also means the scheme has a natural failure mode: people who top up, spend a little, and withdraw the rest.
So what do you think a router's margin is, if it can hand back a tenth of it and still trade?
This is acquisition spend rather than a business model, and the ten percent is the number that moves first. We would expect the open-source rate to fall below ten within six months, or the closed rate to go to zero. If both rates hold through March, we will have underrated how much fat sits in open-model routing, and the whole industry will have learned something from a startup's homepage.
