13 ms·
OpenRouter is joining Stripe
Previously: Stripe will reportedly acquire OpenRouter for $7B+ https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49323381 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49323381
- zurfer 2mo agoWoah now also a 75perc discount on OpenRouter for flash 3.7. Is it really the same product (speed? and up time)? Why would Google do that?
- HDBaseT 2mo agoGemini Flash 3.7 is already "technically" 50% off everywhere until January 2027.
- sidcool 2mo agoGood for OpenRouter. They have a great DevEx. The $7 billion is tad high, but Stripe can afford it.
- zamio 2mo agoWhat's good about their DevEx?
- jacobgold 2mo agoYou create an account. Pay money. Get API key. Use APIs.
- ApolloFortyNine 2mo agoBut if you use any decent amount of tokens, it's probably worth saving the 15% by moving to the provider they're proxying. And if it's not worth it, then are you spending enough where it even effects Openrouter's bottom line? With enough devs playing with hobby projects I'm not doubting it's profitable, only that $7 billion seems way too high.
- asadm 2mo agoOR I can keep paying 15% markup till next month and then jump to newest / cheapest model with one-liner change instead of being locked to a model/provider.
- akho 2mo agoAren't they all the same api? Are you paying 15 % to change one line, and not, like, three?
- cute_boi 2mo agoWhich model/provider locks like this, most of them use chatgpt style apis anyway.
- tomnipotent 2mo agoThat requires that you create accounts and separately manage each provider you want to use. OpenRouter removes that - if a new provider gets added, you can start using them immediately.
- odo1242 2mo agoSo, you’re paying 15% tax on all AI costs to avoid creating an account?
- Tepix 2mo ago15%? Isn't the fee 5.5% with lower fees for enterprise customers?
- gkbrk 2mo agoHint: It's not 15%. And there are many reasons, such as not having to keep up-to-date billing details in 70 providers, and not wasting money because most providers want you to prepay a balance that gets stuck in there if you switch to another provider. It also has way better uptime than the underlying platforms, even for proprietary models like Claude. When Claude APIs are having issues, OpenRouter Claude still keeps working because they can route to AWS Bedrock instead of Anthropic etc. This effect is even bigger with open-weight models because they typically have 5-10 providers.
- sarabande 2mo agoI manage our company's model spend and build tools around it. The good thing about the developer experience is that it is dead simple to create keys that are time-bound, model restricted, and have budgets against them in an easy, programmatic way (also in bulk). Costs are guaranteed to be on par or lower than any model provider, so it's an easy sell to the finance department. To look at it from the other side, Gemini is the absolute worse when it comes to key management. The labyrinth of actions that one has to navigate to generate budgeted keys for a team is not worth it and I still haven't figured out how to manage the keys at a granularity I need. OpenAI and Anthropic both have what I would consider to be middling DevEx. Most things work, but only on their platform, and there are some weirdnesses, like the fact that anthropic disabled its admin API key creation, so you can't programmatically create keys against a budget.
- charlierguo 2mo agoI work on DevEx for OpenAI's API - I'd love to hear more about what we could be improving here!
- matznerd 2mo agoNot OP, but you can't set a per api key limit in OpenAI Platform, you also can't really easily see spending going on per key, and its also in a far off page separate from the keys, really not easy to see what is going on with spend in real time.
- shimman 2mo agoYou're supposedly worth a trillion dollars, can't you know... pay for your own market research rather than forcing the public to provide it for you? Is this what they seriously teach devs there?
- pkfrank 2mo agoGod you're miserable. Damned if you do [engage with the community directly], damned if you don't.
- etskinner 2mo agoSpeaking for myself (I'm not the GP comment): The platform 'just works', has great reporting interface to help understand excatly what usage happened when, and integrates well with lots of different harnesses.
- OleksandrC 2mo agoI am working on my own agent implementation (https://usehax.dev/ https://usehax.dev/), and I can praise OpenRouter for being seemingly the only provider endpoint that actually gives proper API for gathering available models and their capabilities (context length, image support, pricing, etc), reports exact routing details and total cost in the response, and provides an endpoint for obtaining current available credits (for "/usage"-like command). So for OpenRouter specifically I could deliver a really good experience out-of-the-box (always fresh models and metadata, exact pricing, etc). You would think that these things would be standard fare, but they really are not. Other providers need metadata from a separate catalog, don't report pricing, don't really report available credits / usage either. So yes, OpenRouter does have a good DevEx.
- mhh__ 2mo agoIt works
- film42 2mo agoOr rather, Stripe will find a way to make me pay for it as a Stripe and OpenRouter customer.
- Karrot_Kream 2mo agoIt's a mostly equity offer. Private capital is always more risky than publicly traded shares so probably less than $7bn risk adjusted, which makes sense for Stripe.
- BeetleB 2mo agoThey charge a premium of 10%. I would imagine that's a lot of revenue.
- swiftlyTyped 2mo agoAmazing. Huge congrats to the Open Router team
- Taikhoom10 2mo ago[flagged]
- gavino 2mo agoCould someone explain why these routers are so valuable and pulling acquisitions in the billions?
- atleastoptimal 2mo agoDistribution is a big moat and value-add.
- frabcus 2mo agoSo much so that right now GPT-5.6 Sol tokens are half price from OpenRouter compared to OpenAI directly. Which I guess means enough people are using OpenRouter, that OpenAI are more concerned about getting those users to switch (from, presumably, Anthropic) than they are about encouraging OpenRouter to exist and long term reduce margins for them by competition / lack of lock-in.
- dcchambers 2mo agoTokens are just a type of currency. Stripe is a middleman for currency. Using something like OpenRouter (or any of the AI Gateways) is better than tying yourself to one LLM provider that can rug pull on pricing or change models in a way you don't like. The value is in the network effect I think. OpenRouter is popular and has a good head start over anything Stripe could build internally.
- dgellow 2mo agoTokens are not a currency, tokens aren’t fungible and cannot be traded
- victorbjorklund 2mo agoA dollar bill and a euro coin isn’t fungible either.
- osculum 2mo ago
- sparkling 2mo agoMiddleman company buying middleman company. Makes sense.
- itsdesmond 2mo ago> Today, we are excited to announce that we are joining forces with Stripe, to power the next wave of GDP growth globally. This is some high level meaningless corpo speak.
- binary132 2mo agoBig line go up!
- Lalabadie 2mo agoI get where it's coming from, I like Stripe's long-stated mission ("To increase the GDP of the Internet"). This version is dumb/empty, and reads like brown-nosing Stripe.
- strbean 2mo agoI'm curious about the GDP vs. GNP of the internet :)
- jonahx 2mo ago> I like Stripe's long-stated mission ("To increase the GDP of the Internet"). Also corporate speak. Their mission is take their cut of the Internet's GDP. Nothing against them, they provide real value for that cut. But that's what the actual mission is.
- deleted 2mo ago[deleted]
- amcvitty 2mo agoThat feels unfair to read it that way. The mission as stated is that they will not only take a cut of the pie but grow the pie. If the total value they add is greater than the value they capture, everyone wins. You might not believe them, but that’s what the words are supposed to mean.
- anticorporate 2mo ago
- wxw 2mo ago> And as we grow, we will relentlessly aim to preserve the velocity, agility, efficiency, and talent density of the 90-person startup that we are today. Echoes of WhatsApp. Huge congrats to the team!
- jambalaya8 2mo agoman, whatsapp was sure something in early 2017 though.
- yipinwong 2mo agoStripe is a high-velocity environment. OpenRouter (OR) is a startup so might move fast, but unsure if OR can handle the velocity with corporate guardrails put in place already. Any companies that are bought go through culture crashes, and I am interested in how this plays out.
- vldszn 2mo agoCongrats!
- frereubu 2mo ago"Don't post generated text or AI-edited text. HN is for conversation between humans." https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
- vldszn 2mo agosorry, I thought it might be interesting to see the backstory of the company. I also clearly marked that part of my comment is from ChatGPT. I can delete my comment, though.
- frereubu 2mo agoSorry - that probably came across as more passive-aggressive that I mean it. Just wanted to point out that guideline. People have easy access to AI, so they can always ask it for a summary if they want to and it doesn't really add anything to the discussion.
- vldszn 2mo agoNo worries =)
- vldszn 2mo agoupd: removed ai-edited text from my comment
- TZubiri 2mo agoWorth noting that quoting and citing an LLM is miles better than just pasting AI generated text and passing it as your own. AND, if you are too harsh on the former, you incentivize the latter.
- 2mo ago
- deleted 2mo ago[deleted]
- srameshc 2mo agoIt is amazing how we watch from the sidelines these aquisitions and think .... why such big bill ? But it takes a good team to sell and everytime someone is successful it is because probably they have great sellers who believe in their value and demand a price. It is certainly not an easy task to get to the finish line for a startup and pay back their investors.
- abixb 2mo agoCurious on what OpenRouter's true moat is? It's just an LLM API routing framework, right?
- rkangel 2mo agoYeah, and Stripe is "just" a payments platform. Openrouter is easy, reliable and performant (like Stripe).
- abixb 2mo ago[dead]
- bubblegumcrisis 2mo agoAlso it's name has "open" in it. Which means you can do what you want with it, and it's all open source! Just the other day, I tried to have openrouter route to my local ollama, and it refused. Apparently I have to pay for this privilege. How wonderful. Open open (op)en. Open open (op)en. Clo-o-o-ooooo-sed.. (sing with Wagner flight of the V)
- Animats 2mo agoNow that's the value. OpenRouter has the power to step on the air hose of any provider they don't like. That's Google's real power. Works for them. Between search, ads, and the "app store", they can crush most companies. OpenRouter's power is only in one area. For now.
- Nextgrid 2mo ago
- Taikhoom10 2mo ago[flagged]
- yipinwong 2mo agoShut up and take my money (via Stripe)!
- 6thbit 2mo agoThis has to be all about cashflow, right? Surely stripe if anyone have learned to harness the cash flowing through their system. Hell, they could be emitting bonds on expected token consumption bills!
- drob518 2mo agoHm. This seems random. Other than the fact that they are both technology companies, is there anything else that they have in common?
- znnajdla 2mo agoBoth are the most popular developer api in their space.
- swatcoder 2mo agoIn the event that the AI bubble doesn't burst, Stripe needs to have a stake in whatever's coming. They have time to explore and pursue specific strategies, but they just needed to make some big and compatible buy. In this particular case, OpenRouter represents a M x N bridging and enhancement layer much like Stripe themselves, and so must address a lot of parallel technical, dealmaking, accounting, and legal challenges. It may not be obvious on the surface because they seem to be working in such different domain, but they have to address a lot of the same problems in comparable ways and that makes it a pretty darn good fit.
- Taikhoom10 2mo ago[flagged]
- upheaval7276 2mo agoplease stop subjecting us to your Ai slop articles
- deleted 2mo ago[deleted]
- qurren 2mo agoStripe execs said "we should own some AI" Founders found out that they could finally afford to pay their medical, tax, housing bills if they said yes
- OtherShrezzing 2mo agoOne-to-many implementation. Stripe is one api to every bank. Openrouter is one api to every language model.
- WhereIsTheTruth 2mo agoFees will magically appear between agents where they don't need to be What could go wrong
- Taikhoom10 2mo ago[flagged]
- vldszn 2mo agolooks like a money-making machine =)
- TZubiri 2mo agoIf author can't afford a domain, it's hard to trust whatever they have to write.
- Taikhoom10 2mo ago[flagged]
- dwa3592 2mo agoI guess this makes sense for the scenario when we will use machine intelligence as a currency, maybe 15-20 years from now? - like I can pay 15 minutes of inference for a dozen bananas? and the banana seller uses those 15 minutes to do banana shelling or removing weeds from their farms or whatever i guess when robots are doing everything. right??
- jonahx 2mo agoI think this is exactly the bet they're making. I was totally confused by what connected the two companies until I realized "tokens" are basically a nascent, and rapidly growing, "currency".
- rossdavidh 2mo agoOverthinking it. "You have money and need to seem AIish for the stock market, we want real money". You notice they don't do this deal in tokens, they do it in fiat currency.
- mbreese 2mo agoExcept that tokens aren’t completely fungible yet. But, I think we’re approaching the point where it is close enough to be a “proof of work” analog.
- bluefirebrand 2mo agoI hope we aren't on track for this future and if we are I hope a substantial number of people rebel. This is among the more hellish futures I can imagine. Our worth as people reduced to how much access we have to compute. Gross.
- nemomarx 2mo ago[dead]
- dwa3592 2mo agoI hope not; there are a few assumptions in this future- the biggest one is - we will have to attain a baseline intelligence which is useful for everyone which is not true today. even fable fumbles hard!! second is that everyone will have to own a medium to use this intelligence (aka robots). like a currency is useless if you can't use it. to me this is the least daunting scenario. all other scenarios lead to mass slavery.
- rvz 2mo agoThis is before Stripe completing their acquisition of PayPal (which will happen). [0] Maybe there is some plan to pump Stripe's valuation to over $1TN before an IPO. Who knows. [0] https://www.reuters.com/business/finance/stripe-advent-offer-buy-paypal-more-than-53-billion-sources-say-2026-07-15/ https://www.reuters.com/business/finance/stripe-advent-offer...
- Taikhoom10 2mo agoI think the PayPal acquistion is to buy something that throws of real cash, to prevent a down round for Stripe when valuations reset.
- shmde 2mo ago> Today, we are excited to announce that we are... Why do they always start with this. Every single one of them. You dont even want to read anything after that. Its the same "Blah blah nothing will change you will get the best of both worlds blah blah"
- ChrisArchitect 2mo agoPreviously: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49323381 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49323381
- edoceo 2mo agoI've seen three or four others building routers. How hard is that really? The folk I spoke to needed only a few millions to build it (they claim). I've seen prototype of some too that looked pretty simple. Maybe the whole thing is driven by enterprise wanting the external vendor support?
- marcsnid 2mo agoIt's a fairly high scale, but yeah I don't think it's terribly hard. Negotiating rates with the providers seems like it'd be the hardest part to me.
- computomatic 2mo agoMy surface-level assessment is that building a router is easy, but routing efficiently is difficult. For the latter problem, traffic provides signals which you can use to improve routing rules, creating a feedback loop. More traffic => more feedback => better routing. So a lot of the value of Openrouter would be that they are the most adopted router (I think?) and so likely have the most data to (potentially) produce the best router. I'm only speculating.
- 0xbadcafebee 2mo agoIt's hard. - They support 400 different models, 80 different providers, and an unlimited number of new custom agents. Every single model, provider, and agent, has its own weirdness that has to be accounted for. Tool calls change by model. Effort changes by model. Backend APIs (messages, responses, etc) change by provider. There are thousands of specific tweaks, fixes, hacks, that need to be implemented to make this thing "just work". And you have to keep updating it all, weekly. - On top of that, they support providers running in multiple countries, which increases the legal, logistical, financial, and networking complexity. - On top of that, they need to figure out pricing and deals with providers, and ensure the providers allocate the necessary networking and compute capacity. They need to work with providers directly to troubleshoot and fix all kinds of issues, from networking to application. - On top of that, they implement multiple kinds of request routers. An auto router to route your request to the best general model, a fusion model to attempt the request on multiple models and pick the best response, a pareto router to route requests to the best coding model for your request. - On top of that, they build custom features that businesses and users want, like Data Loss Prevention (which I'm blown away they actually provide for free). Lots of very useful business functionality for managing not only what model and provider to use, but also limits on usage, filters, etc. They also implement SSO, prompt injection guardrails, logging/auditing, workspaces, etc. - On top of that, you have to be very good at just implementing HTTP APIs. Most people aren't good at it. API design is hard, HTTP is way more complicated than it seems, network traffic shaping is a black art. - On top of that, running applications and infrastructure, and scaling it 10x every year, is a subtle yet critical skill. No matter how good your code is, it's pointless without working hardware/running apps. - On top of that, they provide a generous free tier, which has to be subsidized, and is probably only partially subsidized by providers. Why pay for this rather than build one? Because there's no sense in building one. There's a reason restaurants don't build their own factories to manufacture their own pots and pans. Their business isn't selling pots and pans, it's selling people cooked steak. It's a bad idea to waste time, effort, and money trying to make things you aren't going to sell.
- marcsnid 2mo agoI'm not happy about this. Having used OpenRouter a lot and enjoying the experience, I need to say that corporate consolidation is never good for consumers.
- goalieca 2mo agocurious as a non-user, but what does openrouter have to do with stripe? Ignoring the corpo-speak about mission statement.. the missions don't really seem aligned in reality.
- marcsnid 2mo agoI don't think they have much to do with stripe. I'm guessing they want to round out their business more and include payments for AI since OpenRouter is basically just an AI traffic router that takes your money and provides it to the APIs you use.
- abigdog 2mo agoMy guess: your LLM agent makes buying decisions for you. Providers of agents can integrate witg stripe. Those using openrouter click a button for micropayment support.
- tyre 2mo agoI wrote a substantial comment about this a few days ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49324405 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49324405
- rnd0 2mo ago>I need to say that corporate consolidation is never good for consumers. Truer words, never spoken. I'm not sure how exactly this will screw me over -but I do know that it will.
- hstaab 2mo agoThen switch. The good news is its’s fairly easy.
- Taikhoom10 2mo ago[flagged]
- brunoborges 2mo agoInteroperability through standards pays off better for customers than integrated solutions, because it pushes integration without vendor lock-in.
- TechSquidTV 2mo ago7 million would sound fair to me. 7 billion? Explain yourself.
- nateb2022 2mo agoOpenRouter already takes in around $140M in yearly revenue. How would paying 5% of yearly revenue make any sense for an acquisition??
- Dylan16807 2mo ago> How would paying 5% of yearly revenue make any sense for an acquisition?? 50x revenue is also a crazy number. I wonder what happens more, companies selling for ≤5% revenue or companies selling for ≥50x revenue.
- nateb2022 2mo agoWell OpenRouter went from ~$5M in mid 2025 to ~$140M about a year later, so although 50x might be compared to current revenue, they probably factored in some growth models to approximate its value over time.
- leros 2mo ago10% would be more typical. Perhaps the math is that OpenRouter inside Stripe makes it twice as valuable. You often see acquisitions priced on the value of the company post-acquisition.
- sneilan1 2mo agoThe 7 billion figure is not just open router's current value. It's also including part of it's projected value in the future. So that 7 billion includes current value + value say 5-10 years out.
- mfld 2mo agoRemember when Google acquired YouTube for $1.6B in 2006? That amount seemed ridiculous at the time. Its now peanuts compared to YouTube's yearly revenue.
- powvans 2mo agoAI products are going to have to deal with accounting. An agent performs some work. It uses some models and perhaps some other metered services. Someone has to meter that activity. They have to attribute costs, apply the product's pricing rules, bill the customer, collect, reconcile with vendors, and maintain the ledger. Stripe can use OpenRouter to build the financial and accounting infrastructure for every product that sells metered AI work. I think the analogy is ADP. Payroll for all the work that's going to be done by AI agents.
- nevi-me 2mo agoIDK, that sounds like a solution in search of a problem. What would be different about this than what OpenRouter is currently doing with pricing?
- robocat 2mo agoMetering as a service? Perhaps stripe thinks metering is a lovely big market? A nice complement to their existing service. Plus a little AI buzz likely helps their valuation. OpenRouter could be a step rather than a goal.
- aleqs 2mo agoEvery token/llm provider already has usage metering...so not sure what exactly you're imagining stripe adds here
- kridsdale1 2mo agoAggregation behind one interface, just like the actual token product.
- aleqs 2mo agoThat's what OpenRouter already does, so the Stripe value add here is still unclear
- 2mo ago
- Digory 2mo agoOn acquisition pricing: Why smarter AI models could drive up compute prices 10x (at least temporarily). This seems mind blowing, but the big boys seem to be behaving as if it's directionally true. If compute is constrained and expensive, OpenRouter is what you'll use to get around the constraints at individual providers. https://x.com/dwarkesh_sp/status/2084333160075055122?s=20 https://x.com/dwarkesh_sp/status/2084333160075055122?s=20
- p1necone 2mo agoIt seems like a misunderstanding of basic economics to assume that the price for this would track FTE salaries.
- dudu24 2mo agoWhat's with naming proprietary stuff "open"?
- redlewel 2mo agoblame openai they started it
- thesdev 2mo agoIt's following the open closed principle.
- Anoian 2mo agoIts sad that you gotta be a software engineer, to immediately get this joke, because its pretty good
- echelon 2mo agoWould "OpenSourceRouter" be a trademark violation? I've built one in Rust and want to market it.
- Pet_Ant 2mo agoNot if you’re in a different domain, then it cannot be claimed to confuse customers. So if it’s a network router or a woodworking router, then you’re good. I can sells of red socks, and white socks, without getting sued by Chicago or Boston. If it’s in the same space… you might want to contact a lawyer. I believe Firefox had conflicts with earlier names like Phoenix and FireBird and they weren’t even browsers.
- teraflop 2mo agoClearly these products are being named by topologists, who have no objection to things being simultaneously open and closed.
- _joel 2mo agoSchrödinger's Product
- radicality 2mo agoThat’s great for the team. Though as a user of openrouter, I am worried that the much larger company will soon find ways to enshittify it :S
- echelon 2mo agoSwitching costs are zero and alternatives are plentiful. OpenRouter is a name.
- Taikhoom10 2mo agoYou're right in that OpenRouter alone does not have embedded switching costs, but bundled with Stripe's other offerings, it creates lock-in.
- yjftsjthsd-h 2mo agoWhat are some good alternatives?
- dethos 2mo agoSome other comments suggested https://cortecs.ai/ https://cortecs.ai/. I never tested it, but from a brief look, it does seem a viable alternative.
- CurbStomper 2mo ago[dead]
- caseclosed 2mo ago> We are the best way to discover and use any AI model He says it like it’s a huge accomplishment that he achieved when it’s an opinion about something trivial
- jijji 2mo agoso basically anybody who uses openrouter from now on is going to have all their data exfiltrated to stripe and then to all the banks/insurance companies... when I read the article that's what I think is going on and it doesn't smell good....
- rew0rk 2mo agoI am somewhat mixed on this, I feel though having it be part of Stripe will make it easier to sell to my leadership as "More Trustworthy" than having it by itself
- Taikhoom10 2mo ago[flagged]
- Marciplan 2mo agou are doing HN better than simon lately, nice
- deleted 2mo ago[deleted]
- tomhow 2mo agoWe've banned this account for using HN primarily for promotion. Most of your comments in this thread include a link to your own site. This is an abuse of HN and is clearly against the guidelines. HN is for curious conversation. It's OK to submit your own work occasionally, but the clear expectation is that most of your participation on HN should be discussing topics in the spirit of curiosity and sharing articles because they're interesting to the community, not because you published them. Edit: FYI we've also banned all the associated accounts and domains. It's really not hard to write software to detect this kind of thing, and keen-eyed community members notice coordinated posting and point it out to us. Please don't waste your time or reputation doing this. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
- rvz 2mo agoAgreed. For everyone else, Heed this serious warning and that applies to everyone else. HN is not for frequent promotional spam, or anything else related to as such. It is not worth it.
- Oras 2mo agoHappy for the OpenRouter team. Been using the platform since early stages and the ability to run any AI model with the same api key and same request has been great to experiment with new models and being able to switch models in prod with minimal effort. They also support fallback by default so you don’t have to write wrappers and logic to choose models, it just works with their SDk using config.
- Computer0 2mo agoThe open router team was good people with a good product. Hopefully they can move on with their lives
- rubiquity 2mo agoThis feels defensive and reactionary after Ramp started getting deeper into AI.
- geek_at 2mo agoand pretty sure they're gonna drop crypto currencies as payment on the platform too
- enraged_camel 2mo agoI doubt it. One of the founders was on a podcast recently and they were singing stablecoin praises.
- denismenace 2mo agoWhy? How do these relate?
- dabbz 2mo agoMetronome has been experimenting with real-time payment on usage based billing for tokens. That technology leverages micro payments using crypto. It's cool but all it's doing is moving the accumulated balance from a provider onto your crypto wallet.
- Exoristos 2mo agoRouting seems to face a similar future as the ever-changing trends in controlling coding agents: you know, context engineering, loop engineering, etc. --Which is that OpenAI and Anthropic quickly seem to release a better way of doing it, in their own products' harnessing, and which third-party and personal solutions will only conflict with.
- apexalpha 2mo agoGreat product, been using it for a while. Turns out even a proxy can be worth $8bn with the right business model behind it. Users get an array of providers competing behind a single API, meaning they have to compete on price and quality not vendor lock-in. This encourages users to join OpenRouter over specific model vendors. Providers get easy access to revenue (and data) and new customers with little to no ad spending, encouraging them onto the platform too. And that's all you need. Win win. Well done and congratulations.
- michaelbuckbee 2mo agoI've been using OpenRouter since relatively early (I build evvl.ai - an eval platform on top of it) and think that they're selling at a good time. An underpinning of their model is that API calls / inference are similar across providers allowing for commodity tokenization cost comparisons, but the providers are beginning to shift to non commodity features that don't easily shift. For instance, calling Gemini with "search grounding" isn't something that OpenRouter can do (they sub their own web search in), last I checked they weren't doing real time voice models, etc.
- lxgr 2mo ago> For instance, calling Gemini with "search grounding" isn't something that OpenRouter can do (they sub their own web search in) It can: https://openrouter.ai/docs/guides/features/server-tools/web-search#native-search-providers https://openrouter.ai/docs/guides/features/server-tools/web-... It's apparently even the default these days (which makes sense, as it's usually better in my experience).
- michaelbuckbee 2mo agoNice. Happy to be mistaken on that point as that seems very useful.
- Whiteshadow12 2mo agoYour main point is still right, the providers are beginning to shift to non-commodity features. Another example might be all the managed agent features, where you get a VM + model, right now it's mostly Google and Anthropic that have this offering. The service tier is another, where Google, Vertex, OAI, Anth offer it but only OAI and Google offer flex service tier and not all models from them get it. OpenRouter for me is an abstraction over that complexity, they will have their work cut out for them.
- stinger 2mo agoReminds me of eBay acquiring Skype
- JBiserkov 2mo agoeBay actually ended up making a net gain of approximately $1.4 billion on its total investment in Skype. Are you perhaps thinking of Microsoft acquiring Skype for $8.5 billion? (a similar amount as the OpenRouter deal)
- greatgib 2mo agoAs a final customer, I hate so much stripe that I'm disappointed that they will be able to impose their shitty rules and business logics to OpenRouter...
- consumer451 2mo agoCongratulations to the OpenRouter team!
- Alien1Being 2mo agoKiss of death for OpenRouter. In five years they will be struggling. In ten they will be dead.
- joering2 2mo agoCongratulation to all who exit at $7b after 3 years, but I have only one question: what problem does this acquisition fix? Did OR lack infrastructure? experience? what was the main drive, other than money, for sale? Because after PayPal, Stripe is the biggest graveyard of frozen accounts who would be otherwise perfectly fine, but some AI decided that this card from this country at this price = send the account to null. So while before you had comfort of using OR, right now you will have Stripe emps and their AI overseeing your queries. And don't get me wrong - Stripe will love you! But once someone pulls the lever - good luck getting at least explanation why they had to boot you out. I never heard of an account being reinstated. This will be like this, only your queries instead of CC charges, will be inspected. I don't see how this is beneficial to anyone, esp. OR users. RIP OpenRouter.
- tomrod 2mo agoWow, that's a win-win! OpenRouter makes things a breeze.
- hmokiguess 2mo agoI rather have protocols be built and less middlemen PaaS. One great example is Open Banking. I would support an Open Router that mirrors Open Banking, unfortunately the Open here doesn’t carry the same connotation. Kudos to the team for succeeding in executing around a clear DX issue during the chaos of providers, though long term I am not really a fan of it staying as is even if Stripe gets to be the one carrying it forward.
- flexagoon 2mo agoEvery single Open Banking implementation I know also requires everyone to go through a useless certified middleman (eg. Plaid, GoCardless, ...) instead of letting people use the APIs directly
- hmokiguess 2mo agoBrazil did PIX which in that case the middleman is the government and everyone got to benefit from
- lxgr 2mo agoIsn't PIX a payment scheme? Open banking is slightly different, as it's more about account access (although with read+write access, you can kind of build it into a payment scheme as well, although it's usually clunky).
- hmokiguess 2mo agoYou're right, they are actually one step ahead and into what is now called Open Finance and aims at extending Open Banking beyond the original vision. The brazilian central bank has a page about it[1] [1] https://www.bcb.gov.br/estabilidadefinanceira/openfinance https://www.bcb.gov.br/estabilidadefinanceira/openfinance
- theplatman 2mo agowould encourage you to read up about how the rest of the world has solved this
- adityashankar 2mo ago> For years, OpenRouter has been called “Stripe for LLMs.” holy crap, save some butter for the bread omg
- momentmaker 2mo agoHere's Stripe's letter to investors explaining its acquisition of OpenRouter (LEAKED) https://x.com/EricNewcomer/status/2090133049291788434 https://x.com/EricNewcomer/status/2090133049291788434
- xnickb 2mo agoAny non X source for this so people who don't use X can have a look?
- demo4567 2mo agofor you and me: https://xcancel.com/EricNewcomer/status/2090133049291788434 https://xcancel.com/EricNewcomer/status/2090133049291788434
- microsoftedging 2mo agohttps://xcancel.com/EricNewcomer/status/2090133049291788434 https://xcancel.com/EricNewcomer/status/2090133049291788434 Edit: ninja'd?
- egorfine 2mo agoSo what's the endgame? Typical late acquisitions are meant to destroy things. What will they destroy with this merger? Openrouter has no moat.
- BonoboIO 2mo ago[dead]
- thataccount 2mo agoOh joy! Stripe is getting to be an even larger beast! Happy day!
- giarc 2mo agoThat's either sarcasm as you are not a fan of Stripe, or actual joy if you are an employee of Stripe holding stock.
- Netherlands007 2mo ago[dead]
- spwa4 2mo agoI would guess the real value of the position Openrouter has in the ecosystem is that they can intercept all data and sell training data from many people, training data that is about as directly relevant for training as it can get. They would not need to log all your data for this, "sampling" is enough, and might in fact be even better sampled. Note: this would include both the request, the response, and competitive responses. This would be very high quality training data. Now at the current point they're sporting and make this data sampling option opt-out, and indeed they do. By default, they collect your data. Model companies will pay a lot for this, especially now, more than customers will ever give to openrouter. Think about this: this is a constant stream of data of exactly what people and companies do with AI models, for all models, updating LIVE. Second, they can provide "competitive intelligence" as well, telling models live how well they're doing and what exactly their strong and weak points are, and in what distribution of token requests this results. There may even be financial companies that pay for this data.
- BrokenCogs 2mo agoGoing through the openrouter team - turns out I know the CEO from an exchange trip we did several years ago (Oxford/Stanford)! Congrats Alex and team!
- ed_mercer 2mo agoAlex's first post about OpenRouter got 6 upvotes and 0 comments on HN https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35481760 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35481760
- fragmede 2mo agoWhat a good find! Makes me feel better about my projects that get zero traction here.
- nikcub 2mo agogetting zero traction here is clearly the path to success :)
- nikcub 2mo agosame with cursor - which was submitted multiple times: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34423387 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34423387 are there more examples of this? a bit of an HN anti-portfolio. good reminder to others.
- jasonjayr 2mo agoThere's the infamous post dismissing DropBox ( https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9224 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9224 )
- heaney-555 2mo agoThis is, somewhat ironically, the most well-known HN comment outside of HN.
- greenfish6 2mo agoIt's also very representative of the HN comment section vibes overall. But such is normal with normies providing startup critiques, if you just look at every announcement and say "this will fail", you'd be right 99% of the time.
- rrmdp 2mo agoPardon my ignorance but... why is OpenRouter worth 7 billion dollars?
- frogperson 2mo agoWell Stripe is owned by Thiel, I'm sure there is some nefarious reason he wants to see everyone's chat history.
- nikcub 2mo agoI love OpenRouter, long time user. Stripe will hopefully be a good custodian. I just want to point out some features of OpenRouter that make it more than just a model selection and routing endpoint and that I find incredibly useful: 0/ Default routing is to the cheapest provider, but they're usually not the most performant. I'd guess 99% of OpenRouter integrations never tweak the default routing. Here you can setup cheapest with performance minimums: https://openrouter.ai/docs/guides/routing/provider-selection#use-case-2-find-the-cheapest-model-meeting-performance-requirements https://openrouter.ai/docs/guides/routing/provider-selection... You can also stack model selection in priority 1/ Using broadcast you can push all your analytics to clickhouse / s3 / snowflake and a bunch of other compatible destinations. Setup a clickhouse server ($5 VPS[0]) and send all your traces to it: https://openrouter.ai/docs/guides/features/broadcast https://openrouter.ai/docs/guides/features/broadcast customise your own observability in your dashboards from there. Superwin 2/ Model router is also a natural home for llm security - OpenRouter has the beginnings of prompt injection detection: https://openrouter.ai/docs/guides/features/guardrails/prompt-injection https://openrouter.ai/docs/guides/features/guardrails/prompt... there is also PII detection. This will show up in observability as rejections/blocks etc. There are so many model routing solutions (same with observability, security etc.) but they're all 80% solutions - OpenRouter really rounds out with well implemented features that you need when deploying models at any scale and I gladly pay the toll. [0] not sure if these exist any more but clickhouse is resource efficient
- deleted 2mo ago[deleted]
- sbinnee 2mo agoI have been using openrouter only superficially. I didn’t know about the broacasting feature. Thanks for that.
- dayeye2006 2mo agonoob q -- does the routing hurt cache hit rate?
- miroljub 2mo ago
- Kuyawa 2mo agoI don't see the use for open router, I can switch API providers without any hassle with just a couple of lines of code and a drop down. Good for them and for those who milk the AI bubble
- johnnyApplePRNG 2mo agoCongrats, OpenRouter is a great product! I check it's model rankings and prices daily. The charts are great. Please never change! On another note... I'm surprised OpenAI didn't buy them. I'm even more surprised OpenAI is giving exclusive discounts on openrouter, essentially encouraging the few API customers they had onto a much larger, cheaper and richer marketplace.
- mNovak 2mo agoCynically, I suspect oAI is subsidizing OR tokens to manipulate perceived traction, since OR usage stats get widely publicized
- HDBaseT 2mo agoWhat exactly does this mean? You can verify the pricing differences from their official API vs. OpenRouter. If you have some grand conspiracy, you should be able to validate it. Yes, on occasion, OpenAI has offered Discounts on their API.
- infinitezest 2mo ago> please never change I've got bad news for you...
- gigatexal 2mo agoAbsolutely nuts to me that a front end aggregator of ai vendors — basically an proxy — plus telemetry is worth 7B What a time to be alive. I’m going to take a 1% stake in a bridge and rename it bridge.ai and sell it for billions too
- josh2600 2mo agoIf you're looking for a privacy protecting version of OpenRouter, my friend Joseph Perla made trustedrouter.com. It's a pretty slick system and if you're building on openrouter today and are worried about stripe integration messing up the product, this is a good option to consider. Separately, congrats to the OpenRouter team. They are selling at the right time in what is undoubtably going to become a contentious market.
- kevinbaiv 2mo ago[dead]
- pranav_tech26 2mo ago[flagged]
- 4d4m 2mo agoLove openrouter, excited for future feature development!
- _pdp_ 2mo agoI've seen a lot of comments here and elsewhere about why is a proxy worth $8b. It is a bit more than a proxy. It is a known brand for model routing and it has developed means to route model on their own and 3rd-party infrastructure at scale and without much issues. Why Stripe? Who knows. I don't see much synergy but why not? If anything it is a way for Stripe to get into the market with agentic payments which may come to be worth a lot more than $7B.
- rtzuigfrg 2mo agoaaand they took crypto payments offline. Meaning all accounts will need some form of KYC since you go through stripe.
- wesammikhail 2mo agoI dont use open router so can someone explain to me how it works in that different vendors have different api parameters? is the selling point that they just give you access to a unified access in where you get to write each request toward the particular api provider's api spec? if so why not just sign up with the vendor directly?
- ceroxylon 2mo agoThe service has been 10/10, everything has felt easy and natural since the start and continually improving. I often learn about new models from OR, and have been a happy customer for years. Kudos for getting the proper recognition, $8B is a fair price in 2026 imo.
- Computer0 2mo agoWith this I am looking to moving my operations to Eurorouter. I am so done with these people (stripe)
- digitaltrees 2mo agoI am glad it’s so easy to code. All these tools keep getting bought, cursor then this, and I have been able to build my own replacements.
- Computer0 2mo agoCongratulations to the open router team. Also: Praying for stripes imminent demise.
- pseudosavant 2mo agoProbably a mixed bag at OpenRouter today. Some employees probably just became very wealthy. Others will see what it's like being owned by a different company with different goals. Layoffs tend to accompany most acquisitions within 6-12 months these days. A $7B price tag probably comes with some hefty expectations.
- arthurcolle 2mo agoI think OpenRouter has a pretty lean staff
- Mairoce 2mo agoSo they essentially resell their enterprise tier access to tokens from each provider while also providing a nice interface/dashboard for their customers?
- ernsheong 2mo agoThere should be a ban on using Open* for for-profit VC-backed companies.
- wseqyrku 2mo agoThat prefix is dead and has lost its meaning. Now you gotta completely avoid it to stand out.
- funlang 2mo ago[flagged]
- tiffanyh 2mo agoCan someone help me understand why OpenAI, Anthropic & other proprietary models would want to make their offerings available on OpenRouter? It seems strategically not in their interest.
- low_tech_punk 2mo agoThey already sell API access to the model on Google/Microsoft/Amazon cloud. OpenRouter is the same deal. Note that the labs are not giving out model weights to OpenRouter. They are just selling tokens.
- tiffanyh 2mo agoOpenAI/Anthropic/etc don’t establish the direct customer relationship. And OpenRouter can steer traffic away from those labs over to their own model. The major labs don’t get personalized data about the user to train on, since it’s aggregated. Which is just some of the reasons why strategically it doesn’t seem in their best interest to allow a middle person.
- deleted 2mo ago[deleted]
- wpietri 2mo agoIt's a land grab. Right now none of them have a dominant position. Much better to get mind share and market share now. They can always squeeze the value chain later. And whoever wins surely will.
- jubilanti 2mo agoQuite frankly, the proprietary company's products are no longer good enough for them to be able to enforce a moat. The scene is popping and nobody is satisfied staying with one provider. If they stopped selling via Openrouter, the 18.2% of Openrouter's revenue that currently goes to OpenAI or the 23.4% of their revenue that goes to Google would probably dry up. Some people would switch back, but those who are happy to juggle multiple budgets and endpoints and API key management infrastructure are already doing so to avoid Openrouter's 5-10% cut. This is really evident at any $bigco where you can wait for weeks for a purchase order, needing leadership's approval and accounting's "I'll get to it when I get to it." > OpenAI/Anthropic/etc don’t establish the direct customer relationship. But they also don't have to pay to support and maintain the direct customer relationship and all the billing, support, liability, etc. The credit card merchant fee (a not insubstantial % at scale) is paid by Openrouter (or Stripe now) and the bill Openrouter pays to OpenAI is transferred probably via wire or something with a lot less fees. Meanwhile if you're paying OpenAI via credit card directly, OpenAI is paying Stripe or whoever. > And OpenRouter can steer traffic away from those labs over to their own model. The inverse is also true. If you've deposited money on a Openrouter account, you've taken a very big step across their proprietary moat. Would the proprietary companies rather lose them as a customer forever, or be able to entice them back, which can be done with a single change of a JSON parameter? > The major labs don’t get personalized data about the user to train on, since it’s aggregated. (Edit: Looked it up, Openrouter does send a pseudonymous but stable hashed userid upstream, stable across different API keys in the same account [0]. That makes de-identification a lot easier.) First, a lot of the corporate use is getting ZDRed, so there's nothing to track without going back on zero data retention. De-identification was trivial for normal web traffic before LLMs. Think of all the crap people's harnesses and claws send without de-identifying. Many coding agents can't help themselves from scanning your home directory. Sure, the type of person to comment on HN probably has good hygene, but the typical vibe coder doesn't even know what they're leaking. [0] https://openrouter.ai/docs/cookbook/administration/user-tracking https://openrouter.ai/docs/cookbook/administration/user-trac...
- thedreammachine 2mo agoI love that they won as a remote team and no constant hype about revenue.
- kittikitti 2mo agoJust as the US deems China as a national security risk, I deem Israel to be a much bigger threat to my cybersecurity. Stripe has vocally supported Israel and I cannot trust any token coming out of OpenRouter after this. Their payment systems have been notoriously bad so this is cause for concern to me. Stripe is a financial institution that has strict requirements for reporting and audits by the US government. It has blocked payments for numerous different services for no reason. I wouldn't trust any infrastructure built on OpenRouter. What exactly is "Open" about OpenRouter anyway?
- chews 2mo agoWhy Stripe? 7 billion reasons to build a squidproxy
- agnishom 2mo ago"to power the next wave of GDP growth" is a wonderfully shallow but impressive clause.
- kylekua 2mo agonice!
- cpill 2mo agoglad I never used them now
- luciana1u 2mo ago[flagged]
- ppwawaw 2mo ago[flagged]
- Keorh 2mo agohahahhaha
- Keorh 2mo agogood
- ashu0x 2mo agogood move by stripe
- alexwrich 2mo agoWhy stripe page? The money... LOL
- affluentlabs 2mo agoIt's honestly insane how valuable so many startups end up being just from AI, wonder if therels ever going to be another breakthrough like this for future people
- tdeck 2mo agoI like OpenRouter. Excited to see where their incredible journey takes them.
- johnbarron 2mo agoDid you meant this for LinkedIn?
- tdeck 2mo agoI was actually thinking of [1] but hopefully it doesn't turn out like that. [1] https://www.tumblr.com/ourincrediblejourney/89180616013/what-is-an-incredible-journey https://www.tumblr.com/ourincrediblejourney/89180616013/what...
- freely0085 2mo agoUsing Open in your company name, when there's nothing about it, should be illegal.
- fungi 2mo agoAnd don't get me started on Sesame!
- open-sesame 2mo agoMe?
- AstralSerenity 2mo agoYes, you!
- tsoukase 2mo agoI used to demand the same but a word can have multiple meanings depending on the context, eg OpenMind means something specific. Open{$IT-term} does not necessarily mean Open Source {$IT-term} and OpenAI might mean an AI available to all people, not implying anything about cost. What could be illegal is the word Free, which a for-profit company would never use in the first place.
- razemio 2mo agoI think it is fitting because they provide „all“ models independent from the provider. Open in this sense means to me being open to switch the model, speed and provider at any time.
- micromacrofoot 2mo agoopen has at least a dozen meanings
- mpalmer 2mo agoWhich ones do you suppose they want their users to think of in connection with them?
- Phelinofist 2mo agoJust a reminder that cortecs.ai exists. Pretty much the same as OpenRouter but build in Europe.
- luciana1u 2mo ago[flagged]
- namjh 2mo agoOpenRouter is great business I agree, but I'm not still convinced how the integrity of providers' models is ensured. In other words, can't the provider serve DSv4 flash advertising it as DSv4 Pro? I'm aware that OpenRouter checks response quality onboarding, and does further checks occasionally, but I'm concerned that it's basically a cat-and-a-mouse problem between the scammers and the detectors. For example, there could be a signal that a specific pattern of requests are from OpenRouter's quality testing bots. Or, they can just route 1% of requests to an inferior model and benefit a small gain, hoping it fits into the statistically allowed margin.
- mmoustafa 2mo agoYes, it is awfully inconsistent today. They run some tests (accuracy table buried on model page) but they are sparse and only capture a single moment in time. I would love to see OpenRouter take this more seriously.
- pixlmint 2mo agoHow is that a problem that's unique to openrouter? Who's to say when I query the Anthropic API directly, wanting to use Opus, but they determine it doesn' need Opus, route it to Sonnet instead and pocket the difference? The only difference with openrouter is that it's another layer where this type of fraud could occur.
- ajyoon 2mo agoOpenRouter's list of providers is very large and includes many little known and sketchy companies.
- floki165 2mo ago[flagged]
- Driftbench 2mo agoStripe acquiring the biggest model gateway makes sense when you think of inference as the next payments. Both are developer API infrastructure where routing and provider abstraction matter.
- Ey7NFZ3P0nzAe 2mo agoFound a good european alternative: https://cortecs.ai/pricing https://cortecs.ai/pricing
- dethos 2mo agoThanks for the suggestion.
- barrell 2mo agoAwesome will check this out. EUrouter is too cost prohibitive for me, and now that open router has been acquired by stripe it’s only a matter of time until it’s unusable
- mbi 2mo agoThey seem to be about twice as expensive on a few openweight models I've checked.
- danvdb 2mo agoProbably the main EU alternative to Openrouter is actually https://requesty.ai https://requesty.ai, more fully featured and equivalent model access.
- nemoniac 2mo agoIt looks like it's based in London, not EU.
- farhanhubble 2mo agoI've not used Open Router but I'm wondering what are the reasons to route LLM queries at large scale? Isn't the trend increasingly to let an orshestrator agent decide which model to use in terms of problem difficulty vs. size and thinking budget? Once you fix those parameters there's little to optimize over, no? I mean you want to find the cheapest one across providers but that's not a recurring decision.
- Mashimo 2mo ago> reasons to route LLM queries at large scale? Convenience. Paying only one provider, but get access to different models hosted around the world. Need a model for a project where latency matters? EU hosted and ZDR for another customer? Cheapest for personal use? You get everything under one roof.
- mft_ 2mo agoI suspect only a very small subset users are sophisticated/interested enough to do that for themselves on a regular basis. More will likely hop between agents based on cost and the perceived nature of the task, without hard data (or an orchestrator model) to support that decision. In the second case OpenRouter is very useful; in the first case, maybe it’s an area they move into in time - providing and owning/optimising the orchestrator?
- happybox2016 2mo agoRaw Cookie header test - OpenRouter + Stripe API limits?
- rwiteshbera 2mo agoHopefully it will be good. I have started using openrouter.
- happybox2016 2mo agoOne thing that always worries me with these acquisitions: how are they gonna handle the impending 5.6M+ Stripe Connect users who rely on OpenRouter's APIs? Will they integrate it into their core infrastructure or leave it as a separate product?
- jamest 2mo agoAlex (the OpenRouter founder) and I went for walks to Sightglass coffee on Divisadero St during our weekly office hours @ HF0 in the Fall of '23. On one walk I asked 'why are you doing another startup?' For context, his last one, OpenSea, was valued well into the billions, so it wasn't for money. His reply: "I just love solving all the puzzles." It's incredibly hard to compete with someone who is playing the game for the love of the game. Kudos on playing well, Alex.
- Flamkuchlo 2mo agoOpenSea is full of scams, has not added any real value to anyone or society. DOn't get me wrong, great for him to make money and being able to move fast and succeed, but you could play this game to if you want.
- PunchyHamster 2mo agonah, the reason is money, you can get puzzle fix somewhere else
- temp7000 2mo ago"inference is quickly becoming the largest line item for every company." — not really? "that will remain essential in a post-AGI economy." — ooof. The magical future economy
- andrepd 2mo agoHow in god's name is openrouter worth $7,000,000,000? Can somebody explain to me, or is everything to do with AI just astronomically overvalued these days.
- hn3ufz62f7 2mo agoFiling under things I wish I knew earlier
- robertpohl 2mo agoCan someone smarter than me explain the business rationale for this deal? Why invest in an LLM API when you are a financial service provider? I can’t see any obvious reason to use Stripe more because of this new product. The only hypothesis I can think of is that AI token could be a ”currency” in the future. (Which doesn’t make sense when everyone will have local LLMs)
- instalabsai 2mo agoBecause they want to charge for it: https://docs.stripe.com/billing/token-billing https://docs.stripe.com/billing/token-billing
- adithyassekhar 2mo agoRoute your LLM requests through the Stripe AI Gateway with an API call. Provide your prompt, model, and Customer ID, and Stripe: 1.Routes the request to the appropriate provider (OpenAI, Anthropic, or Google). 2. Returns the model’s response to your application. 3. Records token usage for billing automatically. 4. Rejects requests when a customer has no credit left (when enabled for your account). Does that mean all api calls to providers go through stripe? Reading the justification for how much of a perfect partner stripe is for openrouter sounded made up, this makes it even better.
- robertpohl 2mo agoIsn't this how all if them work already? OpenAI, Anthropic, Openrouter, etc use Stripe for their billing.
- ATMLOTTOBEER 2mo agoQuality and accuracy of information on the internet is going to shit: Models are already paying per search for gated access to higher accuracy info (this is abstracted by anthropic, chatgpt etc currently where they have cut deals w Google etc to allow their traffic through) Models don’t currently interact with the economy directly in a real way (by eg themselves deciding to pay for a high quality information source), but they will within a few months as folks get more claw-like agents Those transactions can happen with bitcoin…. or they can happen on stripe At least that’s my read
- pioneerjeff 2mo agoI like what openrouter is building, but I didn't use it a lot to be honest. The reason is I couldn't find a agent which is as good as Codex/Claude to integrate it. If there is a agent can make full use of it by routing different tasks to different LLMs by difficulty. That would be perfect. Not sure if there is a agent can achieve this, maybe Deepseek harness have such potential.
- ankushdograuk 2mo agoI've known about openrouter since they were just a browser extension, really happy for them
- spread2009 2mo ago[flagged]
- DesaiAshu 2mo agoGiven how much the US economy has centralized profits to the financial sector - market inefficiency that is quantitative and automate-able with ML - it’s unfortunate to see Stripe pivot industries to expand TAM rather than doubling down on fixing the market inefficiencies within finance (insurance, etc) Maybe a signal of how rigid the moats/lobbies are on insurance and private equity
- nottorp 2mo agoSo ... no more paying for OpenRouter with cards that support 2FA? Heard it's too hard to implement with Stripe.
- kwanbix 2mo agoIs it me only who thinks OpenROUTER is a terrible name? I was thinking of a Network Router.
- bgr80 2mo agoCool, so Stripe basically bought your data you send to OpenRouter with each request. That's a valuable asset that is growing and growing without any effort. 7B$ is probably cheap for this, but who knows.
- wejick 2mo agoFor anyone saying it's just proxy, It's not. It's a big distribution channel, that so far benefiting all sides. a place for inference partner to sell token, for new {players / labs / model} to get exposure and for consumer to discover. The free token also doesn't hurt, given you understand the caveats.
- seanm2w 2mo agoOh wow, I read a article recently that talked about Stripe not being just about payment. I'll take a look at link thanks.
- madmecodes 2mo ago[dead]
- Departed7405 2mo ago7B for a service that just routes your output and that lacks some pretty basic features in their UI ? Feels a but too much. I am a user of the product, so I hope this leads to a better web experience.
- mohammedmsgm 2mo ago[flagged]
- sairintech 2mo agohopefully this becomes a good move for both and helps developers
- hansawe 2mo ago[dead]
- aimen2 2mo agoWhen I see this, I think about Eden AI. I've been using them way before openrouter back in early 2022 before chatgpt when they were routing to AI As A Service apis of deepl, azure, aws, clarifai ...etc but then they pivoted to other platoform ideas. They could have been one of the biggest EU startups in history.