Stripe to Buy OpenRouter for $7B

I both think OpenRouter is not worth 7B$ and Stripe might have made a brilliant move in making this purchase, honestly just troubling thoughts around model inference and model token as the new traded currency go through my head.

Imagine if Stripe's end game is to control which producers of tokens become visible for a price aka middleman tax for tokens. If AI is as big a change as people claim honestly AWS should have bought openrouter instead.

But either way though 7B$ is just too rich no matter what, because the middleman tax is only worth it if you have a moat which OpenRouter doesn't.

All it takes is one of the bigger players to get serious and they will have a similar platform up and working in months if not weeks. (like Vercel & Cloudflare are already doing but even they are small compared to the true behemoths)

If hyperscalers start their own open routing service and cut off openrouter completely and become price competitive, I feel like they could wipe them out.

7B$ is just too much. Without enough of a big defensible moat. Especially since you can use a router in-front of openrouter and move users piece meal.

Can anyone explain what makes OpenRouter specifically worth 7B$ over everyone else? I say that as someone who has used a lot of similar services with similar results. Openrouter is better but only marginally.

This is really interesting, because I'm actively building an open source SaaS router product. We're starting in the FAL area rather than the OpenRouter area (much higher margin), but they eventually intersect.

My thinking is businesses will want the ability to fire their provider and bring things on-prem if they want (but that they'd rather stick with a good provider as long as they're happy). Not so much that they'll do it, more that they'll want the option.

Flexibility isn't super important now as most routers are fungible, but as we move into an era dominated by open source models and fine tunes, that becomes a major impediment to switching. So building this now seems especially important. Especially if we guarantee data and model exports to customers.

A customer with fine tunes of open source models won't find it simple and easy to migrate. But we can build this escape hatch now before that story has a chance to evolve.

And of course there's a lot of add-ons that can be sprinkled on top later: handling customer data/outputs (videos, thumbnails, etc.), spinning up domains for products (eg. Three.js video game LLM outputs), etc. Vercel/Itch.io as a service, Vimeo as a service, media catalogue search as a service, etc. It'd be nice if this was all open source and portable.

Is anyone here interested in a closed beta of a Rust-based "Open" OpenRouter, Fal, (and eventually RunPod and Featherless)? We host it for you, but the entire stack is OSS and you can bring it on-prem if you want. I'd be happy to send invites. My email is "echelon at gmail".

We also do BYOK forwarding, so it's super simple to switch without even paying us. We even support router keys for double routing (OpenRouter and FAL keys in addition to OpenAI, Google, etc.)

Might need to rethink our Stripe payment processing. They have our customer book.

OpenRouter is a two-sided inference market with an established network and spinning flywheel. If Stripe can manage not killing it, it is going to print them money for a long time.

edit: Fixed the poor AM English.

I specifically think many of the hyperscalers are a bad choice to platform on because they have their own models. You cannot build a viable platform business while directly competing with your potential customers and partners, the incentives are too out-of-whack.

Stripe/CF/Vercel are presumably not going to do foundational model development, so safe there. They are already platform plays to begin with, this strengthens that position.

Cloudflare AI Gateway launched in beta in 2023, and went GA in 2024.

Recent overview: https://blog.cloudflare.com/ai-platform/