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- Hacker News
- Such great time to be pets.ai.
Just a tangential thought from our times.
by shelled - I don’t get it. There’s no moat here. OpenRouter isn’t hard to rebuild.by woeirua
- distributionby notfromhere
- Moving money around is harder than it seemsby estebarb
- There are in fact zillions of similar services. OpenRouter is the one everyone knows.by 9cb14c1ec0
- Facebook/instagram/uber/etc is easy to rebuild. The value isn’t in the code.
- As Visa/MasterCard stock price is partly a reflection of the economy at large, I suspect Stripe wants their company valuation to be a reflection of the AI economy.
- Assuming this is true: But why? And how is this valuation justified?by otterley
- Stripe controls parts of APIs for money movement across world. This is just a logical extension to that.by anukin
- To ensure agents are paid through them and maintain market position https://stripe.com/blog/giving-agents-the-ability-to-payby random3
- See projects.dev by Stripe. My best hunch is - Stripe wants to get in on the infrastructure/rails layers being built for AI. They aren't sure what that is going to be exactly (nobody does). OpenRouter seems like a safe bet.by prtmnth
- Not sure how I feel about this. I'm a fan of OpenRouter; it's a super convenient way to work with a bunch of different model providers. Good usage tracking etc. as well.
If Stripe acquires them, I worry that they'll slowly destroy the service, like they did with LemonSqueezy 2 years ago.
- Crazy valuation but not a bad idea. Makes sense for stripe to wanna be the middle man for AI just like they are for payments.
- Makes a lot of sense. If Stripe owned openrouter, they could ditch the 5% fee on top of tokens and make money from Stripes credit card fees.by moojacob
- I think this is the first real step from Stripe into token economics. They tried with a usage-based product, but from talking to stripe engineers, it sounds like there was less appetite than they thought. Could have been for many reasons, but I wonder if owning the actual request layer is a kind of missing ingredient?
If so many applications are just going to be token resellers (which, to be honest, a lot of very successful companies today are), one of the biggest issues is: if I'm charging my users $10 a month for unlimited AI usage, what does that really mean and look like? Do the other users subsidise the super users' use?
Big companies can stomach this uncertainty if they've raised a tonne of capital, but if you're a little solo-preneur or small startup/business (which Stripe historically favour), you have to know exactly how much this is going to cost you. Else, if you're off by a few zeros, this will bankrupt your company.
- I've used openrouter, they work well, it was easy to use. Swipe wants to be used for agent payments, seems like a good match for them.by IronWolve
- How does openrouter help them get to that?by dd8601fn