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AI 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
by powvans 2mo ago
AI 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
- pests 2mo agoNot OP, but I could see the vision. Right now OpenRouter is developer-paid with no way to pass costs onto the end user. Stripe could help bill and meter at the user level for per-user billing. I would also think more SDKs/easier ways to add AI features (paid for via openrouter) into apps and websites.
- aleqs 2mo agoOpen router supports per-request usage metering, as well as per-key. Building user-level metering from this is trivial, and there are many implementations of this out there. Supporting per-user first-class is trivial considering Open router already has per-request and already supports per-request attribution. How important that is, is a big question, but definitely not something that requires Stripe to build.
- user43928 2mo agoCould there be use cases where you want to run inference for users in your app, but don't want to host your own backend, user authentication, and billing? The user could log into his personal OpenRouter account, authorize your application, and optionally set a budget, all in something like a Stripe payment screen.
- aleqs 2mo ago> The user could log into his personal OpenRouter account, authorize your application, and optionally set a budget, all in something like a Stripe payment screen. Like standard oauth? https://openrouter.ai/docs/guides/overview/auth/oauth https://openrouter.ai/docs/guides/overview/auth/oauth
- deleted 2mo ago[deleted]
- user43928 2mo agoGood point, just needs an user friendly flow to sign up and set the budget in a way that is more similar to Stripe checkout than regular account creation.
- ygjb 2mo agoA single policy location for multiple models with usage limits/rate limits, spend limits all configurable using a common syntax + deep integration with account levels and high visibility into subscription/payments related to meter usage to help understand whether or not your pricing model is underwater as costs change is exceptionally valuable. AFAIK each product consuming model providers without an openrouter style proxy has to do that work themselves, and if you are already using stripe for subs/payments, the direct integration is a huge value add for customers, especially if you can alert on "upcoming price changes from your provider changes your unit economics for XYZ packages/sub tiers".
- selvan 2mo agoSimilar to how Stripe is a middleman for payments across (fragmented) banks, they want to be a middleman for (fragmented) AI models as tokens are the new currency. As AI agents/harness/human are spenders of tokens, enabling them to derisk from being locked to a specific model provider & allowing to (re)route to any model at anytime for better leverage in a single API, similar to how they are doing for payments.
- andruby 2mo agopaying for data access, for "deterministic computing", for letting the AI use online services. Maybe even micro payments for using tested and verified skills/mcps. Example: access to real-time stock trading data, access to weather information, letting it make stock trades, etc. At first I was confused why Stripe bought OpenRouter, but I think this makes sense.
- j45 2mo agoAt some point AI will be able to deal with the repetitive and template based parts of accounting better than accounting. Which is saying a lot.
- chairmansteve 2mo agoI'm not sure that's true. LLMs seem too unreliable for accounting.
- RealStupidity 2mo agoI'm always surprised at how many people in the tech sector don't think that things can and will change. In the next couple of years? Sure. 5+? Who knows. Necessity is the mother of invention.
- seanclayton 2mo agoThings can easily change for the worse, such as a stock market crash. Who knows? Will we get AGI or will we see more homeless? History says... AGI for sure!
- wat10000 2mo agoIt's very difficult for this sort of thing to change for the worse. It's basically impossible on the software side. If next year's model is worse then keep using this year's model. Hardware technology can potentially go backwards, but things have to get really bad for that to happen.
- oblio 2mo agoLLMs are inherently unreliable. We do already work with unreliable technologies for many things but there's this engineering principle called "use the right tool for the job". And it's a lot more likely that LLMs can't be changed to become unreliable, it's just how they work. So we would need more basic research, that doesn't grow on trees and for which the timelines are basically open ended. Maybe tomorrow, maybe right after cold fusion hits mass adoption.
- shanev 2mo agoI built modelrelay.ai that does this. Happy to give you an invite code if you want to play with it.
- CTDOCodebases 2mo agoIt's not just that. As user agents become more common it's only natural that they will be used for taking the heavy lifting out of e-commerce purchases. There will be a big need for digital payments to verify and reconcile these purchases. With LLMs that are plugged into digital payments we will essentially have buying agents in our pocket that can find us exactly what we want for the cheapest price and the quickest delivery.