Stripe in talks to buy OpenRouter for ~10B | Hacker News Reader

Stripe in talks to buy OpenRouter for ~10B

wsj.com

62 pointshtrp25 comments

Extremely relevant:

Ramp Router: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48987253

Maybe there were more than 1 bidder for OpenRouter… Regardless, a business like OpenRouter may be best in the form of a complement product of something else (like payment processing).

Wouldn’t it be cheaper to just spend $1B reimplementing it?

(Of course that is absurd, $10M would be plenty)

The value is in the existing customers, isn't it? Not so much the product.

What percentage of the potential market does openrouter have? Like even if they have 100% of today’s customers, they probably have like 3% of 5-years-from-now’s customers.

Seems like it’s also assuming in 5 years from now people will still want an AI router.

How many people even use more than one search engine?

A “search engine router” wouldn’t be very successful…

If AI tokens become unlimited like cell phone minutes, why bother routing?

Just another reason this would be a mind-numbingly dumb acquisition.

Nothing about this bubble makes sense. Why should this?

> If AI tokens become unlimited

Why would they? OpenAI and Anthropic aren't even profitable yet.

Seems incredibly likely that in 5 years every small linux shop has an AI router endpoint like openrouter, but router.smalllinuxshop.net or something with open models. And if there aren't open models anymore ... then openrouter won't exist anymore either.

Hell, I'd be disappointed if half of them don't have one today.

quick you are a saas company pulling 3b cash annually how do you deploy it

Paying dividends to shareholders used to be a thing

https://taikhooms.substack.com/p/why-openrouter-can-be-the-n...

> it has clear platform dynamics. It is an aggregator of AI models, and once enterprises use it, that creates switching costs since all your AI expense is in one place: logs, budgets, etc, so switching would be painful and generally not make a lot of sense.

Clearly what we need is a Router Router, to avoid router lock-in.

You jest but this is basically exactly what happened in crypto.

> It aggregate’s practially ever Large Language Model, then bundles access and takes a flat fee.

Well, at least I know AI didn't write it

How Am I wrong?

Does it mean openrouter can't sustain on its own? If so, bad news, new owner 'd surely want it to be profitable, so expect price hike.. :<

Do sustainable tech startups actually exist?

Damn, any alternatives?

Do they have to

Interesting. I guess it fits since Openrouter's main value is in consolidating payment to all these different model providers

Smart move, I imagine OpenRouter’s business model is very appealing to Stripe.

God, no, I hate how stripe went from a wonder child in 2014 with its propaganda spiel about “we pay all employees 70k/year” to what it is now, PayPal of the 2010s.

Please, no.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com