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- Hacker News
- This has to be all about cashflow, right?
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!
by 6thbit - Could someone explain why these routers are so valuable and pulling acquisitions in the billions?by gavino
- I don't think they are.
Just because some Higher Ups in Stripe bought this, doesn't mean its that valuable.
It can easily be, that Stripe can just afford it and think that they are part of the big boys and thats just what companies cost today.
It could be that Stripe really really like the brand name and all the positive notion of it.
It could be that Stripe doesn't want to build this from scratch in a timefrime of 1 year or 2 because Stripe might be too corporate to be able to do startup stuff.
Stripe has quite a high motivation to leverage agents thoguh because they are preparing for Agents which will buy through stripe. They already provide the SKU backend and support the agent payment stuff.
by Flamkuchlo - It's a simple marketplace and they control a ton of the demand side who trust them to find the best price and providers that work. The value is huge to users - one place, multiple models, providers bid for the traffic and the user doesn't have to think about anything. The value they hold hostage against providers is gargantuan - nice model there it'd be a real shame if none of our users used it.
I don't see how stripe adds any value here (and I've had such terrible experience with stripe automatically breaking my stuff I am worried I can't trust openrouter now) but I can see stripe wanting to be in the middle of any two people giving each other money on the internet and this is squarely (lol) that.
by collingreen - They're selling shovels during a gold rush with a 5% markupby Rebelgecko
- OpenRouter allows you to have 1 API key to access hundreds of models across dozens of providers.
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.
by wyre - Read Ben Thompson to understand aggregation theory. Many of the largest internet companies, like Google and Amazon, are simply aggregators. OpenRouter is an aggregator of AI tooling. Stripe itself was just a convenience layer on top of merchant gateways (another aggregator). OpenRouter is so big they can negotiate special contracts with OpenAI for special rates.by znnajdla
- Frontier model providers (Anthropic et al.) gate new accounts to impractically low rate limits and spending caps until clients unlock higher limits with cumulative usage, make equivalent cash deposits up front, or talk to a Sales department to work out some other arrangement. They are handicapped by the postpaid billing model.
It's an administrative burden to sign up very every model provider, and there are many independent inference providers now that serve only open source models.
OpenRouter provides a useful service by allowing easy prepaid model access with much higher rate limits, and they also aggregate different model providers to route queries by price, latency, etc.
by Shakahs - I don’t understand it, but good for OpenRouter. Personally, I think OpenRouter’s value is somewhat perishable. In the early AI market where there are a jillion models and anew one every week, it’s great to be able to try them all without having to create accounts and keys for each one. OpenRouter, which I use, makes this easy for developers to do. Add some cost controls and other “management” knobs and it works great. But the market is not going to be this frothy forever. As things settle down and commoditize, the value of switching on a dime diminishes as people lock into their favorite models. And with the OpenAI and Anthropic APIs being defacto standards for how to talk to models, it’s easy enough to switch to another model every so often, as long as you aren’t doing it multiple times per week. The other alternative is that OpenRouter stays in the mix but its pricing gets ground down and down. If it’s (nearly) free and still adds some value, fine. But that doesn’t justify $7B. So, yea, I don’t get it from Stripe’s perspective.by drob518
- It’s a marketplace with a markup on every token they sell. And I’d rather go to this shop, than sign up individually at the 70+ different providers they broker access to - even if it comes with a price.
- Alex (the OpenRouter founder) and I went for walks to Sightglass coffee on Divisadero St during our weekly office hours @ HF0 in the Fall of '23.
On one walk I asked 'why are you doing another startup?'
For context, his last one, OpenSea, was valued well into the billions, so it wasn't for money.
His reply: "I just love solving all the puzzles."
It's incredibly hard to compete with someone who is playing the game for the love of the game.
Kudos on playing well, Alex.
by jamest - nah, the reason is money, you can get puzzle fix somewhere else
- OpenSea is full of scams, has not added any real value to anyone or society.
DOn't get me wrong, great for him to make money and being able to move fast and succeed, but you could play this game to if you want.
by Flamkuchlo - Good for OpenRouter. They have a great DevEx. The $7 billion is tad high, but Stripe can afford it.by sidcool
- Or rather, Stripe will find a way to make me pay for it as a Stripe and OpenRouter customer.by film42
- They charge a premium of 10%. I would imagine that's a lot of revenue.by BeetleB
- What's good about their DevEx?by zamio
- It's a mostly equity offer. Private capital is always more risky than publicly traded shares so probably less than $7bn risk adjusted, which makes sense for Stripe.by Karrot_Kream
- Happy for the OpenRouter team. Been using the platform since early stages and the ability to run any AI model with the same api key and same request has been great to experiment with new models and being able to switch models in prod with minimal effort.
They also support fallback by default so you don’t have to write wrappers and logic to choose models, it just works with their SDk using config.
by Oras - The open router team was good people with a good product. Hopefully they can move on with their livesby Computer0
- OpenRouter is great business I agree, but I'm not still convinced how the integrity of providers' models is ensured. In other words, can't the provider serve DSv4 flash advertising it as DSv4 Pro?
I'm aware that OpenRouter checks response quality onboarding, and does further checks occasionally, but I'm concerned that it's basically a cat-and-a-mouse problem between the scammers and the detectors. For example, there could be a signal that a specific pattern of requests are from OpenRouter's quality testing bots. Or, they can just route 1% of requests to an inferior model and benefit a small gain, hoping it fits into the statistically allowed margin.
by namjh - Yes, it is awfully inconsistent today. They run some tests (accuracy table buried on model page) but they are sparse and only capture a single moment in time. I would love to see OpenRouter take this more seriously.by mmoustafa
- How is that a problem that's unique to openrouter? Who's to say when I query the Anthropic API directly, wanting to use Opus, but they determine it doesn' need Opus, route it to Sonnet instead and pocket the difference? The only difference with openrouter is that it's another layer where this type of fraud could occur.by pixlmint
- Found a good european alternative: https://cortecs.ai/pricing
- Thanks for the suggestion.by dethos
- They seem to be about twice as expensive on a few openweight models I've checked.by mbi
- I've been using https://www.eurouter.ai/ and it works quite wellby woile
- Probably the main EU alternative to Openrouter is actually https://requesty.ai, more fully featured and equivalent model access.by danvdb
- Awesome will check this out. EUrouter is too cost prohibitive for me, and now that open router has been acquired by stripe it’s only a matter of time until it’s unusableby barrell
- It's a very young company (https://www.linkedin.com/company/cortecs-ai/) the biggest router in EU is https://edenai.co/ I've been using them since 2.5 yearsby aimen2