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Tokens are not a currency, tokens aren’t fungible and cannot be traded
Yet
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I get where it's coming from, I like Stripe's long-stated mission ("To increase the GDP of the Internet"). This version is dumb/empty, and reads like brown-nosing Stripe.
> I like Stripe's long-stated mission ("To increase the GDP of the Internet"). Also corporate speak. Their mission is take their cut of the Internet's GDP. Nothing against them, they provide real value for that cut. But that's what the actual mission is.
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Tokens are just a type of currency. Stripe is a middleman for currency. Using something like OpenRouter (or any of the AI Gateways) is better than tying yourself to one LLM provider that can rug pull on pricing or change models in a way you don't like. The value is in the network effect I think. OpenRouter is popular and has a good head start over anything Stripe could build internally.
Tokens are not a currency, tokens aren’t fungible and cannot be traded
I guess this makes sense for the scenario when we will use machine intelligence as a currency, maybe 15-20 years from now? - like I can pay 15 minutes of inference for a dozen bananas? and the banana seller uses those 15 minutes to do banana shelling or removing weeds from their farms or whatever i guess when robots are doing everything. right??
I hope we aren't on track for this future and if we are I hope a substantial number of people rebel. This is among the more hellish futures I can imagine. Our worth as people reduced to how much access we have to compute. Gross.
I guess this makes sense for the scenario when we will use machine intelligence as a currency, maybe 15-20 years from now? - like I can pay 15 minutes of inference for a dozen bananas? and the banana seller uses those 15 minutes to do banana shelling or removing weeds from their farms or whatever i guess when robots are doing everything. right??
I think this is exactly the bet they're making. I was totally confused by what connected the two companies until I realized "tokens" are basically a nascent, and rapidly growing, "currency".
> Today, we are excited to announce that we are joining forces with Stripe, to power the next wave of GDP growth globally. This is some high level meaningless corpo speak.
https://stripe.com/annual-updates/2025
> Stripe last said businesses on its platform generated $1.9 trillion in payment volume in 2025, up 34% year over year.
More transaction volume = more enterprise value potential. More GDP, total rake goes up of said economic activity they facilitate. Middleman Moat, accumulating volume (present via Paypal, future via OpenRouter).
Could someone explain why these routers are so valuable and pulling acquisitions in the billions?
Good for OpenRouter. They have a great DevEx. The $7 billion is tad high, but Stripe can afford it.
Good for OpenRouter. They have a great DevEx. The $7 billion is tad high, but Stripe can afford it.
What's good about their DevEx?
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 is the absolute worse when it comes to key management. The labyrinth of actions that one has to navigate to generate budgeted keys for a team is not worth it and I still haven't figured out how to manage the keys at a granularity I need.
OpenAI and Anthropic both have what I would consider to be middling DevEx. Most things work, but only on their platform, and there are some weirdnesses, like the fact that anthropic disabled its admin API key creation, so you can't programmatically create keys against a budget.