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Comment by alberth | Hacker News Reader

I wonder if this deal is primarily just to buy payment volume.

OpenAI just announced earlier this week that Ayden would become their payment provider (when it was previously Stripe).

And OpenRouter has a large percentage of overall AI payment volume for all the major labs.

Both OpenAI and OpenRouter represent ~$100B in payment volume, whereas Stripe in total doing ~$2T. Two customer doing ~5% of your total volume who didn’t even exist a few years ago, must be kind of scary for Stripe.

https://www.reuters.com/business/retail-consumer/rise-ai-sho...

https://stripe.com/newsroom/news/stripe-2025-update

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Adyen just bought Orb [0], a usage-based billing company, for $335M, specifically so they could position themselves as the payments choice for AI companies.

[0] https://www.withorb.com/

Stripe would lock in volume but how exactly are they monetizing that? Any margin the get from OpenRouter is money extracted from OpenRouter’s revenue (which is now theirs.)

7 billion one off for 100 billion annually? If I am understanding that correctly it feels like a no brainer to me…

Also if you think about it differently… OpenRouter is adjacent to what Stripe is but for getting access to AI models. If they dont mess this up they could invest in openerouter and grow that 100b pie.

$100b is payment volume, not revenue. Stripe gross revenue from those payments would be on the order of tenths of a percent of that.

Plus the platform fee that OpenRouter makes? 5 billion a year?

Feels like a cost you’ll pay when you’re trying different stuff out and want to play with different models, but as soon as companies start wanting to cost optimize the 5% middleman is an easy one to cut out.

I think volume is itself good and help Stripe negotiate lower rate with banks etc.

> Two customer doing ~5% of your total volume who didn’t even exist a few years ago, must be kind of scary for Stripe.

Shopify uses Stripe no? Probably good volume discount though.

OpenAI is a large company, and large companies go multi processor for payments. I would check the press release carefully, and see if you can confirm that Adyen is taking all of OpenAI's volume, or even a majority of it.

And how much is so they can write 'AI' in their prospectus

>OpenRouter represent ~$100B in payment volume, whereas Stripe in total doing ~$2T.

That is a much higher % than i expected.

Just SpaceXAI alone is currently doing ~$10B annualized AI revenue numbers (based on last Q results). So that seems reasonable.

Maybe it might also have to do with AI agent wallets and getting deeper in to the agent-based transactional business?

Adyen*

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