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OpenRouter is joining Stripe

openrouter.ai

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Re: OpenRouter is joining Stripe

#441

Post by gkbrk »

ApolloFortyNine wrote: post #120
jacobgold wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You create an account. Pay money. Get API key. Use APIs.

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.

Hint: It's not 15%. And there are many reasons, such as not having to keep up-to-date billing details in 70 providers, and not wasting money because most providers want you to prepay a balance that gets stuck in there if you switch to another provider.

It also has way better uptime than the underlying platforms, even for proprietary models like Claude. When Claude APIs are having issues, OpenRouter Claude still keeps working because they can route to AWS Bedrock instead of Anthropic etc. This effect is even bigger with open-weight models because they typically have 5-10 providers.

Re: OpenRouter is joining Stripe

#442

Post by ifwinterco »

hmokiguess wrote: post #218

I rather have protocols be built and less middlemen PaaS. One great example is Open Banking. I would support an Open Router that mirrors Open Banking, unfortunately the Open here doesn’t carry the same connotation. Kudos to the team for succeeding in executing around a clear DX issue during the chaos of providers, though long term I am not really a fan of it staying as is even if Stripe gets to be the one carrying it…

Open banking protocols exist and are widely used but they’re called crypto, which everyone on HN hates for some reason

Re: OpenRouter is joining Stripe

#443

Post by tdeck »

johnbarron wrote: post #426
tdeck wrote: post #398

I like OpenRouter. Excited to see where their incredible journey takes them.

Did you meant this for LinkedIn?

I was actually thinking of [1] but hopefully it doesn't turn out like that.

[1] https://www.tumblr.com/ourincrediblejourney/89180616013/what...

Re: OpenRouter is joining Stripe

#445

Post by farhanhubble »

I've not used Open Router but I'm wondering what are the reasons to route LLM queries at large scale?

Isn't the trend increasingly to let an orshestrator agent decide which model to use in terms of problem difficulty vs. size and thinking budget?

Once you fix those parameters there's little to optimize over, no? I mean you want to find the cheapest one across providers but that's not a recurring decision.

Re: OpenRouter is joining Stripe

#446

Post by Mashimo »

farhanhubble wrote: post #445

I've not used Open Router but I'm wondering what are the reasons to route LLM queries at large scale? Isn't the trend increasingly to let an orshestrator agent decide which model to use in terms of problem difficulty vs. size and thinking budget? Once you fix those parameters there's little to optimize over, no? I mean you want to find the cheapest one across providers but that's not a recurring decision.

> reasons to route LLM queries at large scale?

Convenience. Paying only one provider, but get access to different models hosted around the world. Need a model for a project where latency matters? EU hosted and ZDR for another customer? Cheapest for personal use?

You get everything under one roof.

Re: OpenRouter is joining Stripe

#448

Post by mft_ »

farhanhubble wrote: post #445

I've not used Open Router but I'm wondering what are the reasons to route LLM queries at large scale? Isn't the trend increasingly to let an orshestrator agent decide which model to use in terms of problem difficulty vs. size and thinking budget? Once you fix those parameters there's little to optimize over, no? I mean you want to find the cheapest one across providers but that's not a recurring decision.

I suspect only a very small subset users are sophisticated/interested enough to do that for themselves on a regular basis. More will likely hop between agents based on cost and the perceived nature of the task, without hard data (or an orchestrator model) to support that decision.

In the second case OpenRouter is very useful; in the first case, maybe it’s an area they move into in time - providing and owning/optimising the orchestrator?

Re: OpenRouter is joining Stripe

#449

Post by dethos »

yjftsjthsd-h wrote: post #260
echelon wrote: post #149

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Switching costs are zero and alternatives are plentiful. OpenRouter is a name.

What are some good alternatives?

Some other comments suggested https://cortecs.ai/. I never tested it, but from a brief look, it does seem a viable alternative.

Re: OpenRouter is joining Stripe

#450

Post by catlifeonmars »

michaelt wrote: post #433
pbreit wrote: post #408

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This seems like something xAi could reproduce in a weekend

The other thing OpenRouter gets you is: Access to loads of models via a common API/sign-up/prepayment mechanism. I want to know which vendor/model does best at my extracting-facts-from-text task? Which does best at my OCR-a-text-document task? Which can deal with a safe-for-work beach photo without a censorship system false alarm? OpenRouter lets me run my tests against openai and anthropic and google and x and byted…

You can do that with AWS too.
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