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OpenRouter is joining Stripe

openrouter.ai

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Re: OpenRouter is joining Stripe

#371

Post by throw03172019 »

giancarlostoro wrote: post #321
apexalpha wrote: post #194

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 spendi…

Someone noted they pass through 100 billion annually if I remember correctly, but they also take a 5.5% cut, so Stripe secures them as a “customer” while getting their money back over time. It also to me feels like an adjacent business aligned with sort of what Stripe already does to begin with, being someone elses middle man.

That feels high if they were bought at $7B? 5.5% of $100B is $5.5B in annual revenue. 1.3x multiple for AI. No way

Re: OpenRouter is joining Stripe

#374

Post by funlang »

Congrats to the OpenRouter team! Been using it since the early days — the ability to try every new model without creating 20 different accounts is still the killer feature. Hope Stripe gives you the resources to keep building.

Re: OpenRouter is joining Stripe

#375

Post by jonahx »

jubilanti wrote: post #368
tiffanyh wrote: post #356

Can someone help me understand why OpenAI, Anthropic & other proprietary models would want to make their offerings available on OpenRouter? It seems strategically not in their interest.

They get paid the same either way, Openrouter takes their cut and passes it onto the consumer. And anyone with an Openrouter account has already escaped from their proprietary moat. So for those who have expressed a clear preference for provider-agnostic model infrastructure, do you want to just wall yourself away from them forever? And per the rankings [0] 18.2% of the tokens sold through went to OpenAI [1]. 3.8% fo…

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Re: OpenRouter is joining Stripe

#376

Post by jubilanti »

tiffanyh wrote: post #364
low_tech_punk wrote: post #357

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They already sell API access to the model on Google/Microsoft/Amazon cloud. OpenRouter is the same deal. Note that the labs are not giving out model weights to OpenRouter. They are just selling tokens.

OpenAI/Anthropic/etc don’t establish the direct customer relationship. And OpenRouter can steer traffic away from those labs over to their own model. The major labs don’t get personalized data about the user to train on, since it’s aggregated. Which is just some of the reasons why strategically it doesn’t seem in their best interest to allow a middle person.

Quite frankly, the proprietary company's products are no longer good enough for them to be able to enforce a moat. The scene is popping and nobody is satisfied staying with one provider. If they stopped selling via Openrouter, the 18.2% of Openrouter's revenue that currently goes to OpenAI or the 23.4% of their revenue that goes to Google would probably dry up. Some people would switch back, but those who are happy to juggle multiple budgets and endpoints and API key management infrastructure are already doing so to avoid Openrouter's 5-10% cut. This is really evident at any $bigco where you can wait for weeks for a purchase order, needing leadership's approval and accounting's "I'll get to it when I get to it."

> OpenAI/Anthropic/etc don’t establish the direct customer relationship.

But they also don't have to pay to support and maintain the direct customer relationship and all the billing, support, liability, etc. The credit card merchant fee (a not insubstantial % at scale) is paid by Openrouter (or Stripe now) and the bill Openrouter pays to OpenAI is transferred probably via wire or something with a lot less fees. Meanwhile if you're paying OpenAI via credit card directly, OpenAI is paying Stripe or whoever.

> And OpenRouter can steer traffic away from those labs over to their own model.

The inverse is also true. If you've deposited money on a Openrouter account, you've taken a very big step across their proprietary moat. Would the proprietary companies rather lose them as a customer forever, or be able to entice them back, which can be done with a single change of a JSON parameter?

> The major labs don’t get personalized data about the user to train on, since it’s aggregated.

(Edit: Looked it up, Openrouter does send a pseudonymous but stable hashed userid upstream, stable across different API keys in the same account [0]. That makes de-identification a lot easier.)

First, a lot of the corporate use is getting ZDRed, so there's nothing to track without going back on zero data retention.

De-identification was trivial for normal web traffic before LLMs. Think of all the crap people's harnesses and claws send without de-identifying. Many coding agents can't help themselves from scanning your home directory.

Sure, the type of person to comment on HN probably has good hygene, but the typical vibe coder doesn't even know what they're leaking.

[0] https://openrouter.ai/docs/cookbook/administration/user-trac...

Re: OpenRouter is joining Stripe

#377

Post by jubilanti »

jonahx wrote: post #375
jubilanti wrote: post #368

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They get paid the same either way, Openrouter takes their cut and passes it onto the consumer. And anyone with an Openrouter account has already escaped from their proprietary moat. So for those who have expressed a clear preference for provider-agnostic model infrastructure, do you want to just wall yourself away from them forever? And per the rankings [0] 18.2% of the tokens sold through went to OpenAI [1]. 3.8% fo…

DELETED

Read my sentence again. With your human eyes and brain:

> **Google's** up there at 23.4% primarily because GCP/Vertex/whatever they're offering is a billing nightmare and the only way to set a hard cap and sure you won't wake up the next day with a $10k bill is via OR.

OpenAI absolutely lets you set a hard or soft cap. I've set them and they've worked, I think one time I saw a $-0.01 balance. Their docs were probably written by ChatGPT. Later in that article it says:

> A spend limit can monitor spend without enforcement, or you can enforce it as a hard limit so API requests fail after spend reaches the limit.

And they still allow the most certain limit, which Google does not: have $0 on your deposited balance and don't have auto-reload enabled, you get 4XXed instead of going into debt (or at least by at most a couple cents).

Although for fun, go ask Gemini how you can set a cap on GCP spend. It'll try to write you a pub-sub client.

Re: OpenRouter is joining Stripe

#378

Post by wat10000 »

seanclayton wrote: post #366
RealStupidity wrote: post #363

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm always surprised at how many people in the tech sector don't think that things can and will change. In the next couple of years? Sure. 5+? Who knows. Necessity is the mother of invention.

Things can easily change for the worse, such as a stock market crash. Who knows? Will we get AGI or will we see more homeless? History says... AGI for sure!

It's very difficult for this sort of thing to change for the worse. It's basically impossible on the software side. If next year's model is worse then keep using this year's model. Hardware technology can potentially go backwards, but things have to get really bad for that to happen.

Re: OpenRouter is joining Stripe

#379

Post by gpt5 »

titularcomment wrote: post #353
gpt5 wrote: post #337

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I mean, the AI skepticism is still so prevalent today in HN, despite it solving decades old math problems, hacking into companies, making software engineer no longer code, etc. (all this just in the last year). So nothing really has changed in this community's vibes.

If you think HN is anti-AI, you are in deep. There isn't many places on the internet (sans X/Twit which i don't check) that is as AI-positive as HN. Sure, holdouts remain but the frontpage has a 60% constant vibecoded project submission.

You are mixing supporting AI (which HN is mostly against, but more supportive than other places), and thinking AI is dumb, which HN has been pretty persistent on for years.

I mean - just looked at this downvoted comment essentially saying the same thing - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49119464. And also the intensity of the replies.

Re: OpenRouter is joining Stripe

#380

Post by DrewADesign »

RealStupidity wrote: post #363
chairmansteve wrote: post #249

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not sure that's true. LLMs seem too unreliable for accounting.

I'm always surprised at how many people in the tech sector don't think that things can and will change. In the next couple of years? Sure. 5+? Who knows. Necessity is the mother of invention.

I'm always surprised at how many people in the tech sector assume overcoming fundamental LLM weaknesses is always “just a matter of time,” and that time will arrive quickly enough to be relevant. If you haven’t seen any of the videos of people trying to get frontier LLMs to count consistently, you might think we’re further from LLM accountant than you realize. It’s not a data problem— I’m pretty sure they’ve encountered numeric progressions between 1 ABs l and 100 before.

And there is no necessity. We have accountants.

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