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

Stripe in talks to buy OpenRouter for about $10B

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40 pointsjulien_c24 comments

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.

How does openrouter help them get to that?

OpenRouter is basically a payment system for LLM tokens. Yes, it does route TCP connections from you to an inference providers' cloud, too, but what is way more important is that it routes money from your wallet to inference providers'wallets.

The latter is the core business of Stripe. For them, buying OpenRouter to become the premier channel for LLM token money makes perfect sense. At least if you assume that the current state of labs offering heavily subsidized subscriptions directly is only temporary and the future lies in people buying tokens and switching between models fluidly - and I consider that the future, in light of the recent developments with Kimi K3.

Are they doing something novel there?

I had assumed they’re just reselling inference, where they’re “routing money” the way Walmart is “routing money” from my wallet to whoever makes Cheez-Its.

Are they doing something unique from resellers there?

They are reselling inference. That is not a novel concept, indeed, a stationary merchant like Walmart does conceptually the same. Although since inference doesn't require any stockkeeping, I would rather compare it to Amazon Marketplace.

But it's been novel for inference services when OpenRouter was founded. And nowadays they have a considerable foothold in the market. There are competitors, but the one everyone knows is OpenRouter.

And since they do not need to maintain any stock, don't need to do anything with queries but route them through 1:1, the most complex thing they do from a business perspective is that they collect your money and route the right amounts to various inference providers that served you.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Assuming this is true: But why? And how is this valuation justified?

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.

Stripe controls parts of APIs for money movement across world. This is just a logical extension to that.

To ensure agents are paid through them and maintain market position https://stripe.com/blog/giving-agents-the-ability-to-pay

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.

[dupe] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49027985

I don’t get it. There’s no moat here. OpenRouter isn’t hard to rebuild.

distribution

Facebook/instagram/uber/etc is easy to rebuild. The value isn’t in the code.

The value in social media is the network. People stay on Instagram because their friends and the people they follow are there.

Open router has no such thing. You can immediately leave it for a copycat and hardly notice it.

OpenRouters moat is that a) everyone knows it, but not their gazillion competitors, and b) their API URLs and key are already configured in your OpenCode/Oh-my-Pi/whatever harness or agent you use.

As long as they offer stable services and do charge the same API prices as competitors (or even less maybe, since they have the most inference providers on board, because OpenRouters' prime popularity also exists with inference providers) you do not really have an incentive to go through the hassle of changing all your configurations.

What you just wrote isn't a moat at all. One is marketing, the other is a find/replace.

A "moat" is something that protects your product that is really hard to overcome. Like a migrating your database to another vendor, for instance... Or finding your friends and the people you follow on another social media service.

Moving money around is harder than it seems

There are in fact zillions of similar services. OpenRouter is the one everyone knows.

Such great time to be pets.ai.

Just a tangential thought from our times.

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