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.
This is some high level meaningless corpo speak.
This version is dumb/empty, and reads like brown-nosing Stripe.
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.
You might not believe them, but that’s what the words are supposed to mean.
Echoes of WhatsApp. Huge congrats to the team!
Any companies that are bought go through culture crashes, and I am interested in how this plays out.
I can delete my comment, though.
AND, if you are too harsh on the former, you incentivize the latter.
Hard to think of any type of company that can do the topline meme as effectively as a compute aggregator proxy. Almost like a bitcoin pool mining company counting their shared miners.
Really? 100M annual? That HAS to be profit, it can't be this crazy.
EDIT: From their website, they say they have 200T monthly tokens, at 10 cents per M token ( optimistic average between free tokens and expensive tokens) that's 20M$/month, which is roughly 240M$.
Bonus track: here's chatgpt completely fumbling the above very simple calculation
https://chatgpt.com/share/6a85f831-9118-83e9-8a06-d32195c557...
I don't doubt the chinese bootleg product that openrouter is peddling is even worse than that.
We are in a bubble confirmed.
Sorry for the negativity, but this is highly bearish news.
Openrouter is easy, reliable and performant (like Stripe).
Just the other day, I tried to have openrouter route to my local ollama, and it refused. Apparently I have to pay for this privilege. How wonderful.
Open open (op)en. Open open (op)en. Clo-o-o-ooooo-sed.. (sing with Wagner flight of the V)
Now is that enough revenue to earn back 7B.... I'm not too sure. I guess they're betting realy big that these sorts of model routers will gain explosive token usage in the future
Surely stripe if anyone have learned to harness the cash flowing through their system. Hell, they could be emitting bonds on expected token consumption bills!
In this particular case, OpenRouter represents a M x N bridging and enhancement layer much like Stripe themselves, and so must address a lot of parallel technical, dealmaking, accounting, and legal challenges.
It may not be obvious on the surface because they seem to be working in such different domain, but they have to address a lot of the same problems in comparable ways and that makes it a pretty darn good fit.
Founders found out that they could finally afford to pay their medical, tax, housing bills if they said yes
What could go wrong
I was totally confused by what connected the two companies until I realized "tokens" are basically a nascent, and rapidly growing, "currency".
This is among the more hellish futures I can imagine. Our worth as people reduced to how much access we have to compute. Gross.
Maybe there is some plan to pump Stripe's valuation to over $1TN before an IPO.
Who knows.
[0] https://www.reuters.com/business/finance/stripe-advent-offer...
Why do they always start with this. Every single one of them. You dont even want to read anything after that. Its the same "Blah blah nothing will change you will get the best of both worlds blah blah"
We are basically back to 2020 trying to get people to understand that an NFT is NOT the underlying asset it abstractly represents…
Can’t explain the valuation since everything in this space is rationally overvalued, but I don’t think OpenRouters valuation is that surprising, all things considered.
https://s-1.vercel.app/posts/why-openrouter-can-be-the-next-...
It's corporate bullshit not because I don't believe they can grow the pie, but because that's not their motivation.
In fact, a nice formula for coming up with your corporate mission statement would be:
1. Ignore your company's ground-truth financial incentives
2. Find a positive 2nd order effect E (or a plausible one) that you don't really care about, but maybe you genuinely think is nice
3. Claim your "passion for E" is what drove you to start your company, and keeps you working, because, of course, all great companies must have a "deeper purpose"
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.
https://s-1.vercel.app/posts/why-openrouter-can-be-the-next-...
Stripe has presumably only purchased them because they think there’s consumer-surplus to monetize here, which presumably will soon be giving me lots of reasons to use something else.
there are a few assumptions in this future- the biggest one is - we will have to attain a baseline intelligence which is useful for everyone which is not true today. even fable fumbles hard!!
second is that everyone will have to own a medium to use this intelligence (aka robots). like a currency is useless if you can't use it.
to me this is the least daunting scenario. all other scenarios lead to mass slavery.
That's not the biggest assumption.
The biggest assumption I see is that the population will have the baseline understanding of how to operate in this new paradigm, which seems impossible given how useless many people still are with computers
Incidentally, this is also why I think Bitcoin is such a non-starter for most people
People will revolt first should one have to trade physical goods (such as food that we need for daily lives) with computing power.
It only takes a few people to incite.
you are right, there will be revolt definitely. i think computing power will replace a lot of things though.
sidcool•46m ago
zamio•25m ago
jacobgold•21m ago
sarabande•20m ago
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.
etskinner•19m ago
OleksandrC•9m ago
You would think that these things would be standard fare, but they really are not. Other providers need metadata from a separate catalog, don't report pricing, don't really report available credits / usage either.
So yes, OpenRouter does have a good DevEx.
film42•20m ago