Absolutely nuts to me that a front end aggregator of ai vendors — basically an proxy — plus telemetry is worth 7B
What a time to be alive. I’m going to take a 1% stake in a bridge and rename it bridge.ai and sell it for billions too
OpenRouter is joining Stripe
311–320 of 532 posts
Re: OpenRouter is joining Stripe
#312Congrats, OpenRouter is a great product! I check it's model rankings and prices daily. The charts are great. Please never change! On another note... I'm surprised OpenAI didn't buy them. I'm even more surprised OpenAI is giving exclusive discounts on openrouter, essentially encouraging the few API customers they had onto a much larger, cheaper and richer marketplace.
Cynically, I suspect oAI is subsidizing OR tokens to manipulate perceived traction, since OR usage stats get widely publicized
Re: OpenRouter is joining Stripe
#313I'm not happy about this. Having used OpenRouter a lot and enjoying the experience, I need to say that corporate consolidation is never good for consumers.
This must a purely aesthetic judgment apriori. Many services of value to me failed for lack of capital.
Re: OpenRouter is joining Stripe
#314If you're looking for a privacy protecting version of OpenRouter, my friend Joseph Perla made trustedrouter.com.
It's a pretty slick system and if you're building on openrouter today and are worried about stripe integration messing up the product, this is a good option to consider.
Separately, congrats to the OpenRouter team. They are selling at the right time in what is undoubtably going to become a contentious market.
Re: OpenRouter is joining Stripe
#315I'm not happy about this. Having used OpenRouter a lot and enjoying the experience, I need to say that corporate consolidation is never good for consumers.
>I need to say that corporate consolidation is never good for consumers. Truer words, never spoken. I'm not sure how exactly this will screw me over -but I do know that it will.
Then switch. The good news is its’s fairly easy.
Re: OpenRouter is joining Stripe
#316[dead]
Re: OpenRouter is joining Stripe
#317Congrats, OpenRouter is a great product! I check it's model rankings and prices daily. The charts are great. Please never change! On another note... I'm surprised OpenAI didn't buy them. I'm even more surprised OpenAI is giving exclusive discounts on openrouter, essentially encouraging the few API customers they had onto a much larger, cheaper and richer marketplace.
Cynically, I suspect oAI is subsidizing OR tokens to manipulate perceived traction, since OR usage stats get widely publicized
What exactly does this mean? You can verify the pricing differences from their official API vs. OpenRouter.
If you have some grand conspiracy, you should be able to validate it. Yes, on occasion, OpenAI has offered Discounts on their API.
Re: OpenRouter is joining Stripe
#318Earlier quoted context omitted.
>I need to say that corporate consolidation is never good for consumers. Truer words, never spoken. I'm not sure how exactly this will screw me over -but I do know that it will.
Then switch. The good news is its’s fairly easy.
What other routers exist that are good in your experience?
Re: OpenRouter is joining Stripe
#319Earlier quoted context omitted.
There's the infamous post dismissing DropBox ( https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9224 )
This is, somewhat ironically, the most well-known HN comment outside of HN.
It's also very representative of the HN comment section vibes overall.
But such is normal with normies providing startup critiques, if you just look at every announcement and say "this will fail", you'd be right 99% of the time.
Re: OpenRouter is joining Stripe
#320Earlier quoted context omitted.
> For instance, calling Gemini with "search grounding" isn't something that OpenRouter can do (they sub their own web search in) It can: https://openrouter.ai/docs/guides/features/server-tools/web-... It's apparently even the default these days (which makes sense, as it's usually better in my experience).
Nice. Happy to be mistaken on that point as that seems very useful.
Your main point is still right, the providers are beginning to shift to non-commodity features.
Another example might be all the managed agent features, where you get a VM + model, right now it's mostly Google and Anthropic that have this offering.
The service tier is another, where Google, Vertex, OAI, Anth offer it but only OAI and Google offer flex service tier and not all models from them get it.
OpenRouter for me is an abstraction over that complexity, they will have their work cut out for them.