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OpenRouter is joining Stripe
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Re: OpenRouter is joining Stripe
#252Could someone explain why these routers are so valuable and pulling acquisitions in the billions?
Read Ben Thompson to understand aggregation theory. Many of the largest internet companies, like Google and Amazon, are simply aggregators. OpenRouter is an aggregator of AI tooling. Stripe itself was just a convenience layer on top of merchant gateways (another aggregator). OpenRouter is so big they can negotiate special contracts with OpenAI for special rates.
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Re: OpenRouter is joining Stripe
#253Earlier quoted context omitted.
What's good about their DevEx?
I manage our company's model spend and build tools around it. The good thing about the developer experience is that it is dead simple to create keys that are time-bound, model restricted, and have budgets against them in an easy, programmatic way (also in bulk). Costs are guaranteed to be on par or lower than any model provider, so it's an easy sell to the finance department. To look at it from the other side, Gemini…
I work on DevEx for OpenAI's API - I'd love to hear more about what we could be improving here!
Re: OpenRouter is joining Stripe
#254Earlier quoted context omitted.
What open banking? I can't even get a read-only token for my personal use to see the balance on my account and I sit two team calls away from people who cooked the API
Deleted. I don’t like starting rage baits… ;)
With vibe coding, you can make a bot that pretends to be human accessing the banks website, and be able to hit the bot with an API, and have the bot interact with the bank for you.
Re: OpenRouter is joining Stripe
#2557 million would sound fair to me. 7 billion? Explain yourself.
2006 called and wants their valuations back.
Re: OpenRouter is joining Stripe
#256I would guess the real value of the position Openrouter has in the ecosystem is that they can intercept all data and sell training data from many people, training data that is about as directly relevant for training as it can get. They would not need to log all your data for this, "sampling" is enough, and might in fact be even better sampled.
Note: this would include both the request, the response, and competitive responses. This would be very high quality training data.
Now at the current point they're sporting and make this data sampling option opt-out, and indeed they do. By default, they collect your data.
Model companies will pay a lot for this, especially now, more than customers will ever give to openrouter. Think about this: this is a constant stream of data of exactly what people and companies do with AI models, for all models, updating LIVE.
Second, they can provide "competitive intelligence" as well, telling models live how well they're doing and what exactly their strong and weak points are, and in what distribution of token requests this results.
There may even be financial companies that pay for this data.
Re: OpenRouter is joining Stripe
#257Earlier quoted context omitted.
I manage our company's model spend and build tools around it. The good thing about the developer experience is that it is dead simple to create keys that are time-bound, model restricted, and have budgets against them in an easy, programmatic way (also in bulk). Costs are guaranteed to be on par or lower than any model provider, so it's an easy sell to the finance department. To look at it from the other side, Gemini…
I work on DevEx for OpenAI's API - I'd love to hear more about what we could be improving here!
Not OP, but you can't set a per api key limit in OpenAI Platform, you also can't really easily see spending going on per key, and its also in a far off page separate from the keys, really not easy to see what is going on with spend in real time.
Re: OpenRouter is joining Stripe
#258Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
So… they’re both middlemen. And that’s enough to justify a $7B acquisition???
Apparently. The price does seem high, but the value of a company is based on it's finances. You could argue companies like Google are just middlemen too.
Re: OpenRouter is joining Stripe
#259Great 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 spendi…
I've been using OpenRouter since relatively early (I build evvl.ai - an eval platform on top of it) and think that they're selling at a good time.
An underpinning of their model is that API calls / inference are similar across providers allowing for commodity tokenization cost comparisons, but the providers are beginning to shift to non commodity features that don't easily shift.
For instance, calling Gemini with "search grounding" isn't something that OpenRouter can do (they sub their own web search in), last I checked they weren't doing real time voice models, etc.