Hm. This seems random. Other than the fact that they are both technology companies, is there anything else that they have in common?
[flagged]
please stop subjecting us to your Ai slop articles
OpenRouter is joining Stripe
121–130 of 532 posts
Re: OpenRouter is joining Stripe
#122Earlier quoted context omitted.
OpenRouter’s “moat” is currently “why would I use anything else?”. Stripe has presumably only purchased them because they think there’s consumer-surplus to monetize here, which presumably will soon be giving me lots of reasons to use something else.
Because the others are cheaper
The others have to charge a payment processing fee and take some profits.
Re: OpenRouter is joining Stripe
#123It 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.
Curious on what OpenRouter's true moat is? It's just an LLM API routing framework, right?
As with Cursor it's the data - all the prompts and responses that can be used to train AI models. Getting a head start on that at the pace of current development costs.
Re: OpenRouter is joining Stripe
#124On 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.
Re: OpenRouter is joining Stripe
#125It 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.
Curious on what OpenRouter's true moat is? It's just an LLM API routing framework, right?
They are the leading LLM API routing tool. Stripe is the leading payments API. They are betting on OpenRouter being as important to developers as payments. Both let them take a small percentage of a shitload of transactions. Being the goto service for APIs and executing well is the moat. Someone else would have to beat the volume leader on price or beat them on execution. Good luck. The only realistic competitors would be Amazon, Google or Microsoft and none have shown any interest so far.
Re: OpenRouter is joining Stripe
#126Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yeah, and Stripe is "just" a payments platform. Openrouter is easy, reliable and performant (like Stripe).
> Stripe is "just" a payments platform Counterpoint: you can't just go to Visa/Mastercard or a merchant acquirer out there and set up an account on the same terms that Stripe can. On the other hand, you can sign up to any LLM provider and get API access on terms that are the same or better (since I'm sure they don't appreciate having a middleman and would benefit from incentivizing direct usage) than OpenRouter gets.
Yes, you can get better pricing if you do it yourself. But the true advantage of OpenRouter is that, in a space where there's a new model being released every week, you can easily switch to whatever model is best at any given time without having to set up accounts with multiple providers. Or you can just experiment with the latest release. Their product is the convenience. Of course if you decide to only use a specific provider or two, then you don't need OpenRouter.
Re: OpenRouter is joining Stripe
#127Hm. This seems random. Other than the fact that they are both technology companies, is there anything else that they have in common?
Stripe is positioning themselves as one of the leading adopters of AI internally. I don't know of public stats but I estimate they're spending on the order of $millions per week on tokens. I assume they've adopted Openrouter and the majority of that spend is going via Openrouter. So they understand the product value, they understand the current gaps, and there's also a threat mitigation. They've likely become very dependent on Openrouter and someone is going to buy it - so they may as well negate the risk to that. (Threat mitigation alone is not worth $7B but it justifies a certain premium.)
They also have very complementary problems and skills. The long-term roadmap for routers is auto-routing; that is, turning traffic into signals into automated decisions. Stripe has a lot of overlapping talent and experience from fraud-detection and likely other products.
Re: OpenRouter is joining Stripe
#128Earlier quoted context omitted.
"Don't post generated text or AI-edited text. HN is for conversation between humans." https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
Worth 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.
> quoting and citing an LLM is miles better
Not really. If someone is interested in an LLM's opinion, they can ask it themselves, all LLM providers are one browser tab away.
Re: OpenRouter is joining Stripe
#129Could someone explain why these routers are so valuable and pulling acquisitions in the billions?
On acquisition pricing: Why smarter AI models could drive up compute prices 10x (at least temporarily). [0]
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.
[0] https://x.com/dwarkesh_sp/status/2084333160075055122?s=20
Re: OpenRouter is joining Stripe
#130Hm. This seems random. Other than the fact that they are both technology companies, is there anything else that they have in common?
One-to-many implementation. Stripe is one api to every bank. Openrouter is one api to every language model.
And... How do they combine? I really curious.