SecondRail

For every user who has been trapped by the big companies.

Your app never dies because one AI company froze your account.

Like a hybrid engine — electric first, and when it's out of charge, the gas kicks in. A hybrid can't be stranded by one fuel system — and the passenger never feels the switch.

Live — routing on OpenRouter

Two glowing rails — gold and green — curving through a dark digital landscape, a light travelling along them
Your app Anthropic — primary OpenRouter — fallback Answered — no duplicate text
Add your keys (encrypted)Customer status

Start free — no card, no maze

One app, failover only, free. Give us an email and you get a customer ID — then add your two provider keys and change one base URL in your app.

How it works — three steps

  1. Sign up free — one email, one customer ID. No card.
  2. Add your two provider keys — Anthropic direct and OpenRouter. They are encrypted on SecondRail, never logged, and you keep paying those providers directly.
  3. Change one base URL in your app — point it at SecondRail. If a rail dies, the request silently moves to the other one, mid-request.

Stuck at any step? Tap Ask SecondRail at the bottom right — the setup guide walks you through it, one step at a time.

Try the failover — live

This sends one real message through SecondRail. The primary rail (Anthropic) is down for this account, so watch it fail over to OpenRouter and answer in the same request. One tiny OpenRouter call — a few hundredths of a cent.

What happened

On Oct 24–25, 2026, a provider's auto-reload failed 22 times on cards that worked everywhere else, notices went to an unwatched inbox, and a live product's AI features shut off entirely. The provider's so-called backup was a model fallback inside the same empty wallet. Five days later the fallback wallet also ran dry — silently.

Get your provider keys

SecondRail is bring-your-own-keys. Get a key from each provider, then come back here to finish — you pay those providers directly, SecondRail only charges its flat fee.

Get OpenRouter key Get Anthropic key Add your keys (encrypted)
Return to SecondRail — I'm done with OpenRouterReturn to SecondRail — I'm done with AnthropicOpen the full key setup

Note: OpenRouter and Anthropic run their own sites, so they do not auto-redirect back to SecondRail on their own. The buttons above open them in a new tab, so your SecondRail tab stays open — use the return links above, or switch back to this tab, to finish here.

Pricing, up front

Free
$0

One app, failover only.

★ Best value
Per app
$9/mo

Two rails, failover, error shield, status page.

Pro
$19/mo

Failover alerts (email/SMS when a rail dies), multiple apps.

Live proof — not promises

Checking live status…

Checking rail health…

First live message, Nov 6, 2026: Anthropic failed as expected, SecondRail fell over to OpenRouter and answered “Hi” in 1.4 seconds — 15 input tokens, 4 output tokens, $0.000035.

Live rail and failover events come from the status API right now — nothing here is a made-up number.

Honest limits: bring-your-own-keys means SecondRail cannot fill an empty tank. It changes visibility, warning, and failover. Provider extras work only on the direct rail and degrade on fallback. SecondRail protects against billing/account death and single-provider outages — not against a model company exiting entirely.

Customer status · Status API · Key setup · Add your keys (encrypted)