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- Hacker News
- The strategy here is that the same services that Stripe offers for payments have corollaries in the LLM world. Security, user management, perhaps injection attack monitoring, etc.
However I think they dearly overpaid for this as the core technology behind Stripe (fraud detection and integration with global banks) is hard to replicate. Even with the features mentioned above I think the technologies behind OpenRouter are vastly easier to replicate, perhaps even trivial now.
by aabhay - If someone from Stripe / OpenRouter is listening, please let me provide Open Router OAuth to my users and let me take a cut of their usage. Apple takes 30, I would take whatever the users are willing to pay. 5 to 15 is reasonable.by EastSmith
- we added that to our router https://trustedrouter.com/sign-in-with-trustedrouterby ljlolel
- For the first part they have https://openrouter.ai/docs/guides/overview/auth/oauth (which I haven't used). That gives you an openrouter key for that user (openrouter bills the user).
What value are you providing that you'd take some further cut? You could take the money from the user via stripe and then pay your own openrouter bill instead.
by awwaiid - I'm still amazed at Apple's 30%, it's just so brazenly high (like: "fuck you, we're Apple, we do what we want and you'll lick it up"). Unfortunately, too, other companies follow Apple's lead, and so this massive rent seeking percentage has become normalised.by BLKNSLVR
- Everyone seems to be asking why this a great strategic fit for Stripe.
Stripe can now provide tools to every product that sells metered AI usage and take a cut. This isn't about extracting a small percent on the tokens flowing from your coding agents to your model of choice. It's about all the products that are going to come to market and monetize metered usage.
Want to analyze your 2026 tax return? Use VisorAI's Tax Agent and pay only for what you use. Stripe provides all the accounting, payment processing, ships money to vendors, and takes a bit off the top. Trillions of dollars moving from the labor market to the token market? It's $10B per point in fees for every trillion.
by powvans - sorry did i just read a tax agent ad in a HN commentby swyx
- > Earlier this year, Atallah described OpenRouter as the AI equivalent of Stripe.
Not sure I understand how this is strategically aligned for Stripe but certainly an interesting comparison.
by zacharyozer - Both are in the business of putting a single API key in front of a fragmented ecosystem and charging a convenience fee. This middleman business is naturally coalescing.
The nature of the ecosystem also means that pricing is closely tied to "procurement" which could be routing, limits, whatever at a company level.
If stripe wants to be _the_ one that charges that fee, they either have to continuously try to ensure that all the different middlenen use stripe (most of them do!) but even better is to acquire the largest middleman.
You don't want someone else who happens to do all the routing+limits+policies, end up not using stripe. They already have this hold in existing stripe financial products where they apply all the policies, and everything goes through them.
It is also an easy deal from an investor point of view.
- Perhaps the US State Dept. used it's strong relationship with Stripe to encourage this purchase as a geopolitical move. They've done so before with companies like eBay and Microsoft to neuter the P2P telephone access network that was "Skype".by superkuh
- OpenRouter uses Stripe to handle payments [1], so this acquisition hopefully will reduce OpenRouter's cost while increasing Stripe's revenue.
- Any implication for the privacy and confidentiality of our queries? Openrouter yes sees everything. But as long as they are independent and establishing their core business on privacy and confidentiality reputation, I feel more comfortable with this than with a new broker. AI queries can contain more sensitive information than just financials. And financial informations are protected by law, btw. AI queries, however, are not.by sinuhe69
- Does this mean they will be censoring openrouter?
Is there an open source alternative for when the censoring begins?
by stevenicr - Yes.
No idea.
by rnd0 - Openrouter is super well positioned in the market.
I've always believed in staying model agnostic and being able to jump around providers as their intelligence, cost per intelligence and/or latency issues arise.
Openrouter will win as long as there is competition in the market
by mikkelam - > Openrouter will win as long as there is competition in the market
True. Lots of companies depend on this lever. The moment someone emerges as monopoly, which is very very unlikely to happen, that will create dent in such space like in which openrouter operates.
- Historically acquisitions have never really been good for customers. Time for me to look for an OpenRouter alternative? At least they're also as easy to switch from as the model providers they proxy.by skeledrew
- I'm working on a SaaS where you can switch between different OpenRouters on the fly. /sby PetahNZ
- what are you looking for in an alternative?
my site is the only end to end encrypted one TrustedRouter.com
by ljlolel - Same fear. At least it wasn't Googleby justinhj
- Why look for an alternative before you’re affected in any way?by therealdrag0
- AFAIK there isn't currently a direct competitor, but your best bet is to setup your own LLM gateway, and add various providers to it (beyond the frontier labs, there are the open-weights hosters, like baseten, fireworks, etc)
It's a pain to manage though, and that's what makes openrouter's service valuable to be fair
by drbscl - OpenRouter raised money at a $1.3 billion valuation a few months ago, if the NYTimes reported valuation is accurate.
Going from a $1.3b valuation to a $7b exit in a couple months is an amazing return for those investors. I hope the OpenRouter employees got some decent equity out of this
by Aurornis - They should just hold Stripe stock, plus there are always liquidation preferences so it is not so black and whiteby Taikhoom10
- Open weight models did take off significantly over the past couple of months. You can see their exponential curve in https://openrouter.ai/rankings#top-models
It's so significant that even OpenAI is doing promos on OpenRouter. It's 50% cheaper to use Luna (provider: OpenAI) on OpenRouter, than via OpenAI's first party platform.
by dannyw - How can a middle man for api calls be worth so much? Their market share can’t be very large right? For comparison, $7B is more than market cap of Lyft, Dolby, and Alaska Airlines. What is happening?by Gecko4072
- It's pretty valuable to own the customer touch point
Also when people ask questions like this it usually means they're asking questions about a point in time, eg given today's numbers
But valuation should account for trajectory (where will they be in five years?)
In the hypothesized bull case for ai, they benefit dramatically from the secular tailwinds (ie unrelated to their own business strategy) of AI
So one way to consider this is it's a hedge by stripe in case AI becomes as big as some people think it is. And 7b to get in on the ai wave is a good deal in that case. And in all the other cases, it goes to zero and stripe is fine
by wrsh07 - Cursor got bought for $60B. This is simply how AI companies are valued.
- I prefer using OpenRouter because the money I pay them in premium is far less than the money I lose by not using it on other providers. On OpenRouter, I can switch dollars between models. But for the providers, after evaluating I'm stuck with some number of credits on ones I don't use. This kind of intermediation is actually super useful to me. I must imagine that they can also provide other things that are of value like provider quality measures, ability to swap providers during downtime, etc.by arjie
- If any of those companies put Ai into their pitch they too would be worth billionsby blitzar