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OpenRouter is joining Stripe

openrouter.ai

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Re: OpenRouter is joining Stripe

#181

Post by heurist »

bluefirebrand wrote: post #45
dwa3592 wrote: post #38

I 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??

I 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.

It doesn't make much sense as compute isn't all that scarce (relative to other commodities) and will be less so in 15 years.

Re: OpenRouter is joining Stripe

#182

Post by nevi-me »

powvans wrote: post #109

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…

IDK, that sounds like a solution in search of a problem. What would be different about this than what OpenRouter is currently doing with pricing?

Re: OpenRouter is joining Stripe

#183

Post by aleqs »

powvans wrote: post #109

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…

Every token/llm provider already has usage metering...so not sure what exactly you're imagining stripe adds here

Re: OpenRouter is joining Stripe

#184

Post by aleqs »

meric_ wrote: post #95
abixb wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Curious on what OpenRouter's true moat is? It's just an LLM API routing framework, right?

OpenRouter is already the entrenched go-to router tbh. There's competitors (Vercel) but they're already well known. Stripe can also make them more competitive because they can waive / profit off the transaction cost. Considering stripe takes like a 3% fee, and the openrouter markup is 5%, that's a pretty big boost. Now is that enough revenue to earn back 7B.... I'm not too sure. I guess they're betting realy big that…

I don't get the 'transaction fee reduction' arguments. Yeah they can reduce the fee, which in turn reduces profit margin... any other product/service in a similar position can do the same... it's not some sort of free win

Re: OpenRouter is joining Stripe

#185

Post by surgical_fire »

Nextgrid wrote: post #106
rkangel wrote: post #71

Earlier 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.

To add to this; payment infrastructure requires a lot of heavy lifting. There's a lot of regulations you need to adhere to, different payment systems in different countries, settlement, chargebacks, etc.

There is a reason why not doing your own payment processing is a thing.

OpenRouter may have some interesting things in streamlining the process of switching LLM providers, but it is indeed something easy to replicate in comparison to payment processing.

Re: OpenRouter is joining Stripe

#186

Post by dwa3592 »

heurist wrote: post #181
bluefirebrand wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I 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.

It doesn't make much sense as compute isn't all that scarce (relative to other commodities) and will be less so in 15 years.

Does it have to be scarce for it to become a currency? It just needs to be regulated which I think it will be.

Re: OpenRouter is joining Stripe

#187

Post by Karrot_Kream »

sidcool wrote: post #2

Good for OpenRouter. They have a great DevEx. The $7 billion is tad high, but Stripe can afford it.

It'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.

Re: OpenRouter is joining Stripe

#189

Post by tomhow »

Taikhoom10 wrote: post #171

[flagged]

We'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.

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https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Re: OpenRouter is joining Stripe

#190

Post by aleqs »

yipinwong wrote: post #72
wxw wrote: post #9

> 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!

Stripe 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.

In what way is Stripe a 'high-velocity environment' ?
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