Because they want to charge for it: https://docs.stripe.com/billing/token-billing
Route your LLM requests through the Stripe AI Gateway with an API call. Provide your prompt, model, and Customer ID, and Stripe: 1.Routes the request to the appropriate provider (OpenAI, Anthropic, or Google). 2. Returns the model’s response to your application. 3. Records token usage for billing automatically. 4. Rejects requests when a customer has no credit left (when enabled for your account). Does that mean all…
Isn't this how all if them work already?
OpenAI, Anthropic, Openrouter, etc use Stripe for their billing.
I love OpenRouter, long time user. Stripe will hopefully be a good custodian. I just want to point out some features of OpenRouter that make it more than just a model selection and routing endpoint and that I find incredibly useful: 0/ Default routing is to the cheapest provider, but they're usually not the most performant. I'd guess 99% of OpenRouter integrations never tweak the default routing. Here you can setup c…
They might be popular for indie developers, but nobody doing serious AI or in a corporate environment is using them. And if they are, their compliance team is about to strike them down. The VCs forcing this acquisition do know this. - Why would you add a penalty of 50 ms at a minimum? And that is not the p95... Just run LiteLLM in house and you dont even really need that. - Their capacity pools are shared across the…
> Why would you add a penalty of 50 ms at a minimum?
All of the customer service bots I've dealt with recently were reasoning models that thought for multiple seconds. I would not have noticed 50ms extra.
For anyone saying it's just proxy, It's not. It's a big distribution channel, that so far benefiting all sides.
a place for inference partner to sell token, for new {players / labs / model} to get exposure and for consumer to discover.
The free token also doesn't hurt, given you understand the caveats.
I'm not just talking about LLMs though. People thought the internet and email were just a fad that would never catch on. People thought that the idea of home computing was absurd. All because they only saw what was in front of them at the time. Also, how many accountants do you know that are truly happy with their work? I'd like to think many of them would love to do something other than crunch numbers all day.
> People thought the internet and email were just a fad that would never catch on. People thought that the idea of home computing was absurd. We're far removed from "we've sold all the computers the world can buy" (back from when computers were the size of a building). This is a disingenuous argument. The web and email were basically instant hits and people realized it. Similar story for home computing once the compu…
Email was a hit well before the internet existed. The utility was immediately apparent. And while people had lots of concerns about the internet, like misinformation and consumer-level utility, it was never broadly considered to be as dubiously useful or ethically fraught as LLMs and diffusion models. You can definitely find articles criticizing the bubble-forming finances, and one or two written by dedicated serial naysayers, but it was not a common perspective. Anybody who lived through that era will remember a hell of a lot more pushback against mobile phone adoption than Internet adoption, and even that was culturally marginal.
I love OpenRouter, long time user. Stripe will hopefully be a good custodian. I just want to point out some features of OpenRouter that make it more than just a model selection and routing endpoint and that I find incredibly useful: 0/ Default routing is to the cheapest provider, but they're usually not the most performant. I'd guess 99% of OpenRouter integrations never tweak the default routing. Here you can setup c…
They might be popular for indie developers, but nobody doing serious AI or in a corporate environment is using them. And if they are, their compliance team is about to strike them down. The VCs forcing this acquisition do know this. - Why would you add a penalty of 50 ms at a minimum? And that is not the p95... Just run LiteLLM in house and you dont even really need that. - Their capacity pools are shared across the…
It’s not just solo developers. Startup teams with limited time that are focusing their energy on finding the right product to build also use openrouter.
I think the bet is that you offer enough value-adds that companies who find traction don’t want to switch to something enterprise grade, and you grow into being enterprise grade with them.
Very similar to Stripe’s trajectory, incidentally.
You're supposedly worth a trillion dollars, can't you know... pay for your own market research rather than forcing the public to provide it for you? Is this what they seriously teach devs there?
God you're miserable. Damned if you do [engage with the community directly], damned if you don't.
You should pay the public if you want them to provide something valuable for you. I know Sam Altman is a leech but you should have some morals here.
> A company like OpenRouter that promises the cheapest tokens by the minute becomes essential on the low-cost margin. Okay, I can see that, but if their value is just cost optimization, their ability to mark up the tokens becomes increasingly difficult as well. Or, people will build a router themselves to avoid paying the markup, possibly with reduced features, but someone will open source it. Heck, Claude or GPT can…
First, cost optimization directly contributes to how much markup they can charge. Say on average they deliver savings of 20%, that is excess value OR/Stripe can mostly capture. Also, you don't need to mark up tokens much if you're a commodity volume business. Think of Costco and their margins & membership fees. Not everything has to be high margin, not everything has to be a SaaS subscription.
Well, it depends on how they deliver that savings. If it’s through something unique and defensible, something that only they (with some moat) can do, then yes, they can argue for a fraction of the savings. But if prices just go lower because things are commodities, then they are going to be viewed as middleman markup on top of already low prices. In that case, their value add is considerably lower.