Providers

BatchRouter is a routing marketplace: when you submit a batch, the router picks the cheapest eligible provider lane that meets your requirements. Providers are the upstream services behind those lanes — hyperscale APIs like OpenAI and Anthropic, aggregators, and managed edge networks that onboard through the public Provider API. The provider directory is public and read-only, so you can see who can run your work before you create a batch.

This guide covers the two provider endpoints and how providers relate to lanes and the routing_mode you choose at quote and create time.

List providersCopy Anchor Link

GET /v1/providers returns the public provider directory — each entry's slug, display_name, description, is_enabled status, and the supported_operations it can run.

curl https://api.batchrouter.com/v1/providers \
  -H "Authorization: Bearer $BATCHROUTER_API_KEY"

The response is a providers array. Fields below are illustrative — slugs and names you see are real, but treat values as a snapshot:

{
  "providers": [
    {
      "slug": "openai",
      "display_name": "OpenAI",
      "description": "Native OpenAI Batch API for responses and embeddings.",
      "is_enabled": true,
      "supported_operations": ["responses", "embeddings"]
    },
    {
      "slug": "anthropic",
      "display_name": "Anthropic",
      "description": "Anthropic Messages batch API.",
      "is_enabled": true,
      "supported_operations": ["responses"]
    }
  ]
}

Get one providerCopy Anchor Link

GET /v1/providers/{slug} returns a single provider keyed by its slug (for example openai). The response wraps the same provider shape under a provider key and includes the provider's supported_operations and models. A provider profile may also carry richer marketplace metadata — the provider's processing countries and regions (processing_countries and supported_regions: published metadata, not an enforced residency guarantee), capacity signals, and the provider's declared data-retention policy (published, but the router does not compare the declared retention window against your batch). The full, authoritative field list is in the API reference; fetch a live provider to see exactly what it exposes.

curl https://api.batchrouter.com/v1/providers/openai \
  -H "Authorization: Bearer $BATCHROUTER_API_KEY"

An unknown slug returns 404.

Providers, lanes, and routingCopy Anchor Link

A lane is a concrete way to run a piece of work: a specific provider serving a specific model, with the provider's region tags. One provider typically offers several lanes. When you quote or create a batch, the router applies your hard requirements (model, allowed regions, privacy tier, required hosted tools, deadline), discards lanes that can't satisfy them, then ranks what's left — by price for direct routes — and selects the cheapest eligible lane (splitting across lanes when one can't finish in time). The region check compares your allowed_regions with what the provider declares (see Processing countries and regions), and a provider marked global always passes it, so it is not a residency guarantee.

routing_mode lets you constrain which providers are even considered:

Every quote and every batch returns a routing receipt naming the selected lane(s) and why other eligible lanes were not chosen — so a public_only or edge_only choice is always auditable. See How routing works for the full ranking and rejection model.

Processing countries and regionsCopy Anchor Link

A registered provider declares the country or countries it runs inference in as processing_countries (lower-case codes such as de or us). BatchRouter derives the provider's supported_regions from them: the countries themselves, plus eu when every country is an EU member. Every lane of that provider carries those tags. Built-in providers don't declare countries, so their processing_countries is empty.

The region check compares your allowed_regions with what the provider declares:

• Work with no region restriction (allowed_regions left out, or containing global) can go to any provider.
• Region-restricted work goes to a provider with declared countries only when your list covers every country it runs in, by name or through a group such as eu.
• A provider without declared countries matches when its regions share a value with your list. A provider marked global always matches, so region is not an enforced residency guarantee.

See Region matching for examples.

When a provider starts taking workCopy Anchor Link

A registered provider sets itself up in the provider portal. When it completes the setup checklist and presses Go live, routing to it starts automatically. There is no manual approval step. A provider must declare at least one processing country before it can go live. BatchRouter operators can switch a provider's routing off and on.

Next stepsCopy Anchor Link