Posted by rvz 18 hours ago
Openrouter is easy, reliable and performant (like Stripe).
Counterpoint: you can't just go to Visa/Mastercard or a merchant acquirer out there and set up an account on the same terms that Stripe can.
On the other hand, you can sign up to any LLM provider and get API access on terms that are the same or better (since I'm sure they don't appreciate having a middleman and would benefit from incentivizing direct usage) than OpenRouter gets.
Or if one of the provider suddenly decide to forbid openrouter from using their api. Why would they do that tho ?? Well it's not like execs never take dumb decisions.
In my humble opinion, it's extremely overpriced. But then, it's just the standard with AI currently. Divide every ai company valuation by 1000 and you might get it's real value.
Their only value comes from the fact that the currently have lots of traffic. And I dkn't think that their cumstomers are really bound to theur servuce. They could switch to a competitor without too much hassle.
There is a reason why not doing your own payment processing is a thing.
OpenRouter may have some interesting things in streamlining the process of switching LLM providers, but it is indeed something easy to replicate in comparison to payment processing.
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)
That's Google's real power. Works for them. Between search, ads, and the "app store", they can crush most companies. OpenRouter's power is only in one area. For now.
Payment platforms existed for years before Stripe came along. They solved the problems the others couldn't.
On the other hand, I operate an app that talks to (and logs prompts/meters costs) to many different LLM API providers, and I do not consider it painful at all. I have an AI agent to deal with any integration quirks, if needed. Mostly they provide OpenAI-compatible APIs anyhow. It's basically a no-brainer to go direct with the providers and save 5%, the great majority of the cost of an AI-powered app is no longer dev time implementing the integration, it's the tokens themselves.
OpenRouter is commodity stuff, I've never used it personally and picked alternatives. The sense I got from people who said they used it was that they are on average penny pinchers. That does not seem like an ideal user base
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
Also, TrustedRouter's website is full of slop, which does not inspire much confidence.
In this case I imagine that OpenRouter's moat is going to be that businesses that already use Stripe will have a lower bar to choosing OpenRouter to provide the AI access, and clean integration with Stripe to pay for stuff like AI support bots.
The flexibility is kind of what I'm pointing to, if I understand you right. Instead of dealing with Anthropic, OpenAI, XAi etc directly and having systems to handle user assignment, budgeting etc for each, companies just deal with GitHub, which they've probably been dealing with anyway.
When I build an application that uses LLMs, it's tuned and tested for a specific model only. LLMs are not really drop-in replacements of each other, even different versions of the same series.
The pertinent question isn't why OpenRouter but why a router company is worth 7B.
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.
Negotiations start when sales is done.
These were highly capable negotiators.
But most likely also good salesmen.
edit: Inflation does not account for the observed growth.
It's a business line more suited to finance, law, sales, and accounting people than tech people and a pretty laborious one. That's often the case when the tech looks "easy" but the sector only seems to have a few big winners.
- They support 400 different models, 80 different providers, and an unlimited number of new custom agents. Every single model, provider, and agent, has its own weirdness that has to be accounted for. Tool calls change by model. Effort changes by model. Backend APIs (messages, responses, etc) change by provider. There are thousands of specific tweaks, fixes, hacks, that need to be implemented to make this thing "just work". And you have to keep updating it all, weekly.
- On top of that, they support providers running in multiple countries, which increases the legal, logistical, financial, and networking complexity.
- On top of that, they need to figure out pricing and deals with providers, and ensure the providers allocate the necessary networking and compute capacity. They need to work with providers directly to troubleshoot and fix all kinds of issues, from networking to application.
- On top of that, they implement multiple kinds of request routers. An auto router to route your request to the best general model, a fusion model to attempt the request on multiple models and pick the best response, a pareto router to route requests to the best coding model for your request.
- On top of that, they build custom features that businesses and users want, like Data Loss Prevention (which I'm blown away they actually provide for free). Lots of very useful business functionality for managing not only what model and provider to use, but also limits on usage, filters, etc. They also implement SSO, prompt injection guardrails, logging/auditing, workspaces, etc.
- On top of that, you have to be very good at just implementing HTTP APIs. Most people aren't good at it. API design is hard, HTTP is way more complicated than it seems, network traffic shaping is a black art.
- On top of that, running applications and infrastructure, and scaling it 10x every year, is a subtle yet critical skill. No matter how good your code is, it's pointless without working hardware/running apps.
- On top of that, they provide a generous free tier, which has to be subsidized, and is probably only partially subsidized by providers.
Why pay for this rather than build one? Because there's no sense in building one. There's a reason restaurants don't build their own factories to manufacture their own pots and pans. Their business isn't selling pots and pans, it's selling people cooked steak. It's a bad idea to waste time, effort, and money trying to make things you aren't going to sell.
This seems mind blowing, but the big boys seem to be behaving as if it's directionally true.
If compute is constrained and expensive, OpenRouter is what you'll use to get around the constraints at individual providers.
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.
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, accumulating volume (present via Paypal, future via OpenRouter).
Hermes Agent is AI slop "ai assistant" software that is being entirely developed by a bunch of AI agents. They are stuck in a constant whack-a-mole bug fix session because the agents keep breaking things.
Openrouter is being entirely propped up by garbage-tier software that is only popular because it's being endlessly hyped by idiot youtuber AI Agent Bros who are so uncreative and incapable of critical thought, they're using AI agents to tell them what content to make.
When people finally realize how bad Hermes is, OpenRouter is pretty fucked. And then when all the weebs writing furry porn get bored and move on, they'll be fucked even more.
What's really bad about this: Stripe is so tightly tied to the credit card industry that said industry's obsession with morality policing will force Stripe to start censoring openrouter.
It is a known brand for model routing and it has developed means to route model on their own and 3rd-party infrastructure at scale and without much issues.
Why Stripe? Who knows. I don't see much synergy but why not? If anything it is a way for Stripe to get into the market with agentic payments which may come to be worth a lot more than $7B.