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To people asking why, this is a good lesson on the Collison’s ambitions. Stripe is one of the best API companies in the world. They know how to serve high volum

• absolutenobody0 2mo ago
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• 27183 2mo ago
  unless it's all just tulip mania, then they just spent $7B on nothing
  • LPisGood 2mo ago
    Here are some things that are abundantly clear to me. 1.) LLMs are useful for programming 2.) Open models are excellent and will continue to improve 3.) Economies of scale and ease of access mean self hosting is out of the question for a large number of users This means that even if the largest labs are not worth trillions and a large amount of the data center build out is not as valuable as the builders project and GPU/RAM prices plummet, it will not matter at all for this business. People will want to buy cheap open source tokens from a centralized trusted provider. $7 billion for a business with little overhead that is already within their core competency and has strategic growth potential seems like a very good deal.
    • 27183 2mo ago
      Unfortunately we don't really know anything about OpenRouter or Stripe's numbers. They're both private companies. AFAIK there really isn't much information publicly available about how profitable or not OpenRouter actually is, or whether it has a little or a lot of overhead. So I can't really say whether $7B is reasonable or inflated. It seems like an enormous number, and my hunch is like all the other enormous numbers floating around in the AI space it's probably inflated by the hype bubble. But we just don't know. Broadly I agree with you. It seems like they have an in-demand product and there could be a sustainable business there at least in principle. But whether it's a $7B business or a $70M business I can't say.
    • blobbers 2mo ago
      What does openrouter actually do though? They buy a bunch of tokens from token providers and allow you to easily route queries between token processors? This seems like the kind of thing that you can have Claude write in an afternoon for whatever service you're running. I don't see the value.
      • byzantinegene 2mo ago
        i think plenty of people don't want to be forced to using just Claude and ChatGPT
      • sipjca 2mo ago
        people are lazy people don't want to maintain infra (ie adding new models all the time) people want their queries to work without thinking if a provider goes down, openrouter queries dont (ideally) it's really not that complex to understand
        • blobbers 2mo ago
          Yeah, but who wants to deploy a model just like that. I mean, what if that model doesn't handle the same guard rails. There's a million reasons why switching models should not be a snap decision. The back-up model is not a bad idea, but nonetheless...
      • 2mo ago
  • doctorpangloss 2mo ago
    depends what the tulips are. tokens? private growth stage shares? openrouter is involved with a lot of scammy crypto personalities. maybe they are the tulips people have been manic about for too long. maybe the collisons are the tulips.
• ohcmon 2mo ago
  Ok, at first I didn’t get it and thought it would make sense if stripe just wants to build payments for agents, but on a second thought your idea about “once buy tokens — use everywhere” is very good one!
• christina97 2mo ago
  Do people feel Stripe APIs are really that good? I’ve always found them unintuitive, tons of options, weird edge cases, breaking occasionally, etc. I’m sure payments are convoluted, but I’d still imagine they could be meaningfully easier for the bulk 80% of use case?
  • rpmisms 2mo ago
    Yes, Stripe is extremely good at what they do. Payments are complicated.
    • ballon_monkey 2mo ago
      Payments themselves are so much complicated. Payments to support multi-currency, jurisdictions, countries, scenarios, that's complicated.
      • rpmisms 2mo ago
        I'm friends with a payment docs writer. Holy crap are payments complicated.
  • umpalumpaaa 2mo ago
    I have implemented the Swift payment Spec and I can tell you having this abstracted in a nice API is so much better.
  • Aeolun 2mo ago
    I mean. They used to be good. When they started out their docs were absolutely far above the competition. They aren’t now, and Stripe has lived long enough that they’ve seen themselves become the villain.
    • georgel 2mo ago
      Feature bloat definitely made their API and product docs harder than the early days. Stripe Checkout would have saved my teams days, but I agree, they need to go back to their roots and make the 99% use case very easy.
• Marciplan 2mo ago
  why did they miss the market that is OpenRouter?
  • halJordan 2mo ago
    You're asking how someone missed llms. On this website? That demonized them for years and is only now fighting the cultural battle to accept them as useful?
• runako 2mo ago
  > Tokens are simply a lightweight valuable asset (Not picking on you here, you just provided a well-written peg for a popular narrative. I'm aiming to sharpen my own thinking here & perhaps learn something.) This seems like a stretch given the rise of local inference, especially the Prism Labs rumors from a few weeks ago. One way I think about LLMs is they are akin to fancy databases in that they are software of which you can ask questions and get answers if you ask properly. Oracle & SQL Server are akin to OpenAI and Anthropic, and there are analogues for MySQL, PostgreSQL, SQLite, MongoDB, PlanetScale, etc. (This is an analogy, it's not going to be a perfect fit.) In that view, would it make sense for someone to say that their credit card processor just bought the company that makes their ODBC driver? Would anybody suggest that the TPS of their RDS instance is a lightweight asset? I don't see this as strategic beyond the obvious idea that Stripe wants to get closer to AI, and they haven't been able to get the market to care about their natural linkage to AI (Radar). > they can start hosting their own models and competing as an AWS for tokens The financial pressure of doing this has caused cuts to core product teams at the richest companies (which Stripe isn't!). I would not want my payments processor to go down this road and to get worse at processing payments.
  • tyre 2mo ago
    > would it make sense for someone to say that their credit card processor just bought the company that makes their ODBC driver? Would anybody suggest that the TPS of their RDS instance is a lightweight asset? Would is make sense to say that their online bookstore now sells Ethernet cables, bidets, and delivers groceries? Sells _cloud infrastructure_?? Amazon made two transitions: 1. Amazon the online bookseller => Amazon "The Everything Store" 2. Amazon the online retailer => Amazon the Cloud Services company I believe what Stripe is doing here is closer to (1). "We are good at high-throughput APIs that wrap complexity with thin margins. We did it for credit cards, then ~all payment methods, now other digital bits." In this context, tokens are much, much easier than international payments. Now: Is it outlandish for their customers? Not really. Every engineer knows stripe as an engineering company. I don't think Stripe is what it once was, but it's certainly a generational company. You're asking engineers—who broadly have a positive impression of Stripe—to use this product they already know. OpenRouter gets the positive brand association (trust) of Stripe; Stripe expands into a new domain whose technical needs are extremely similar.
• danielmarkbruce 2mo ago
  You'd be surprised how little volume of api calls payments companies get compared to advertising companies or consumer internet companies. Stripe aren't especially well placed to own this asset on a technical level. That doesn't make this a bad acquisition per se, but there is no magic stripe can inject here as far as infra/technology is concerned.
  • manquer 2mo ago
    Agree, even in the payments space usage-billing metrics providers like Chargebee / Lago etc get order(s) of magnitude more data than payment. Granted payments and associated ledges require a level of consistency that other systems do not require, but that is orthogonal to high volume.
    • weird-eye-issue 2mo ago
      Stripe also supports usage based billing... If you think Lago gets more volume than Stripe I just don't know what to tell you lol
      • manquer 2mo ago
        Lago cloud ? Probably not , lago like sentry is more likely to be self-hosted . Stripe completed the metronome acquisition their usage billing offering just 8months back , that hardly makes Stripe the largest player in this place when they are not even fully integrated .
        • weird-eye-issue 2mo ago
          Lol there is no way that self-hosted Sentry gets more volume than the SaaS version You are way off here
          • tommica 2mo ago
            Would be great if either one would be able to back their claims with some data. But yes, I'd also imagine that SaaS version gets more traffic, but maybe there are some self-hosted enterprise editions that get insane amount of traffic
• nickv 2mo ago
  Yea, I totally get why they want to be in this space (especially if you see transaction volume becoming more agentic), but why buy it? Why not do what Cloudflare or Vercel or AWS, etc did and just build your own? Stripe already has killer APIs and knows how to build API infrastructure at Extreme scale, it still has developer cred after all these years, they are already Kings of multiplexing to different sources -- so why not just build your own LLM gateway? My only guesses are: they want to buy the traffic instead of trying to organically grow it (but I feel like Stripe would get the volume anyway because of name rec), they want to buy the revenue and think they can dramatically reduce COGs because of efficiencies, buying the relationships with the frontier labs (who all dogfood their LLMs in pseudo-private on OR), or... something else? That's the part I'm confused about.
• MangoCoffee 2mo ago
  A lot of the freakout and "bye" posts on the OpenCodeCLI subreddit due to DeepSeek raising prices. Stripe is a middleman. So is OpenRouter. So is OpenCode. Unless you own the data center and the hardware, how cheap can a middleman's tokens really be compared to the hyperscalers, without massive model compression? Even DeepSeek itself is raising token prices. How much margin is there for a middleman like Stripe buying tokens in bulk from a data center and reselling them? Last i check Stripe do not run or own physical data center I doubt Stripe can do much better here.
  • fragmede 2mo ago
    That's old economy thinking. If you have shit tons of data about the behavior of large groups of people, someone will pay you for it. HFT firms paying for satellite pictures of shopping mall parking lots in order to get an advantage over their competitors is old news, but it gives you an idea of the game being played. Why do you think meta bought gif keyboard?
• windexh8er 2mo ago
  I guess everyone is selling tulips now. For me, if this deal goes through, I'll find an OpenRouter competitor. I have no interest in Stripe backing this. I realize: I don't matter. But I'll continue to vote with dollars. Eventually the masses will matter again.
  • ljlolel 2mo ago
    what are you looking for in a competitor? doing research for my end to end encrypted router TrustedRouter
    • Macha 2mo ago
      For me the big reason I use OpenRouter rather than the providers directly is the ability to cap spending. With OpenRouter I can top up by $50, change models on a whim and if some agent loop goes out of control and generates a ton of tokens, the most I can be out is $50, while using the providers directly requires me to manage accounts there and not all support top up based spending.
      • ljlolel 2mo ago
        we have total, daily, weekly, and monthly soft and hard budget caps
      • shawnmuggle 2mo ago
        [dead]
• admiralrohan 2mo ago
  Thanks for preemptively answering the question of why. And it makes sense.
• otterley 2mo ago
  Why should businesses trust a MITM that can snoop on their LLM conversations? It’s one thing to share confidential data with a model provider if that’s the only way to get the benefit, but given all the hand wringing I see from executives and infosec folks about restricting who internal information can be shared with, I don’t see why they’d let additional parties have access to it as well. It’s like we spent all this time enabling ubiquitous TLS to keep enable end-to-end encryption of all communications, but all of a sudden we’re now totally okay with having a 3P observe and record all of them so we can save a few bucks. Stripe operates in a highly regulated environment and have earned the trust of the banks, merchants and payment networks. But LLMs are operating in a completely unregulated environment and I’m not sure the trust Stripe has earned for the former is transitive to the latter.
• winningChild 2mo ago
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• ed_elliott_asc 2mo ago
  But 7 Billion to start that process? That is an awful lot of money
  • moeadham 2mo ago
    shares. its paper. they issue new shares to buy the company. yes, its dilution, but its not the same as cash.
• deleted 2mo ago
  [deleted]
• epolanski 2mo ago
  This makes no sense to me, payments are low volume traffic, their biggest constraints are getting business logic, security and transactions right. LLMs are a different beast.
• root-parent 2mo ago
  >> monetization challenges of every AI company Except OpenRouter sees all your prompts, sends your requests to different providers with pinky promises that they dont use your data, and is therefore a non starter for any company who cares about compliance. If Stripe wants to spend 7 billion on a glorified reverse-proxy-api-gateway go ahead. I can here and now, guarantee to be able to reproduce all their functionality in 3 months, and for less than 10 million dollars. And Stripe internal engineering teams should be able to do better, as I will do it in the evenings only :-))
  • petcat 2mo ago
    Classic HN dev: it's just an API proxy! I can reproduce it myself for cheaper! Ignoring that you can't reproduce the widespread adoption and mindshare OpenRouter has already built. That's what Stripe is spending $7 billion on.
    • rzzzt 2mo ago
      What is the prohibiting factor to getting these?
    • root-parent 2mo ago
      Mindshare ? Nowadays people switch models like shirts, and providers faster. Its not Oracle or Microsoft...Those 7 billion are just a dropdown menu...
      • vanuatu 2mo ago
        You can go ahead and build it then, then sell it for only $100M to a competitor. Should be easy peasy
        • root-parent 2mo ago
          OpenRouter is the evidence that yes. Its just that the idea is dumb. What you are seeing in VCs salving their own money, buying their investment out with the money they out into more successful ventures. Look at how the same pools of capital sit on multiple sides of the market: the router, the payment layer, and the model providers... Its all the same club Investor ---- Economic Overlap --------------------------------------------------------- Andreessen - OpenRouter, Stripe, OpenAI, Mistral, xAI Sequoia - OpenRouter, Stripe, OpenAI, Anthropic, xAI CapitalG - OpenRouter, Stripe, Google/Alphabet MenloVentures - OpenRouter, Anthropic NVentures - OpenRouter, OpenAI, Anthropic, Mistral AMP PBC - OpenRouter, Anthropic
• conorcleary 2mo ago
  It's amusing that the industry allowed 'tokenz' to be a thing at all. It's like that scorpion and the frog story but we haven't even left shore yet. We've got all these other measurements to keep track of but now oh the MAG 7 needs some performance tolls? They don't understand the Streisand Effect nor the Pirate Bay perseverance.
• simonebrunozzi 2mo ago
  I think your view is a bit too optimistic/nice in regards to Stripe, for this specific situation. Payments have nothing to do with LLMs. They are two different businesses. Doing well in one makes Stripe not particularly well suited to do well in the new, other one. I see this more of an attempt at capturing hype/eyeballs/attention, given that Stripe has been private for a long time, and that the latest valuation is not particularly higher than the one from years ago. It is a company that I really like, but one should question their real business and how likely they are to go public. Owning Openrouter allows them to insert some "story" about the growth potential of the company. At the end, the retail investor will pay for all the BS, particularly around AI this time - not sure if this acquistion is the case or not, but I suspect it's a possibility.
• everfrustrated 2mo ago
  Buying OpenRouter has nothing to do with APIs. Stripe wants to be in the business of collecting a % on the economy at large. This is why people buy Visa or Mastercard stock. It is not because of the tech but because it's effectively a tracker for economic activity (you could also argue rent-seeking over the economy but whatever). Stripe can then sell potential investors on their stock being basically a tracker on the AI economy. Now you get access to private AI companies growth as well! IPO time!
• everfrustrated 2mo ago
  >Stripe is one of the best API companies in the world If you think API companies have any value - Twilio (TWLO) is a case study against that.
  • danielmarkbruce 2mo ago
    Twilio market cap is $35 billion. That's a decent amount of value.
• dboreham 2mo ago
  My understanding is that 90% of what companies processing payments do is: fraud prevention and regulatory compliance.
• sparklingmango 2mo ago
  > To people asking why, this is a good lesson on the Collison’s ambitions. Where can I read more on Collison's ambitions?
• aleqs 2mo ago
  > Stripe is one of the best API companies in the world. They know how to serve high volumes of latency and availability sensitive requests. Do you have any numbers to back that up?