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OpenRouter is joining Stripe

openrouter.ai

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Re: OpenRouter is joining Stripe

#191

Post by j45 »

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…

At 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.

Re: OpenRouter is joining Stripe

#192

Post by Exoristos »

Routing 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.

Re: OpenRouter is joining Stripe

#193

Post by kridsdale1 »

aleqs wrote: post #183
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

Aggregation behind one interface, just like the actual token product.

Re: OpenRouter is joining Stripe

#194

Post by apexalpha »

Great 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.

Re: OpenRouter is joining Stripe

#196

Post by leros »

nateb2022 wrote: post #114
TechSquidTV wrote: post #108

7 million would sound fair to me. 7 billion? Explain yourself.

OpenRouter already takes in around $140M in yearly revenue. How would paying 5% of yearly revenue make any sense for an acquisition??

10% 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.

Re: OpenRouter is joining Stripe

#197

Post by shanev »

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…

I built modelrelay.ai that does this. Happy to give you an invite code if you want to play with it.

Re: OpenRouter is joining Stripe

#199

Post by leros »

deely3 wrote: post #130
OtherShrezzing wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Their business models are actually kind of similar. Stripe is just passing money between financial institutions and taking a small cut. OpenRouter is basically the same thing. They might have shared ability on how to run an effective pass through business.

Re: OpenRouter is joining Stripe

#200

Post by cute_boi »

asadm wrote: post #165
ApolloFortyNine wrote: post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But 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.

OR 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.

Which model/provider locks like this, most of them use chatgpt style apis anyway.
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