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Comment by tyre | Hacker News Reader

To people asking why, this is a good lesson on the Collison’s ambitions. Stripe is one of the best API companies in the world. They know how to serve high volumes of latency and availability sensitive requests. They’ve abstracted the financial rails for payments and now want to abstract the rails for LLMs.

They’re the perfect company to own OpenRouter.

Tokens are simply a lightweight valuable asset. Stripe can serve as the middleman as well as anyone. They know how to route to many providers (payment rails) with huge differences in service characteristics. LLM providers are far easier.

Then they can work this into an offering where users can subscribe to tokens and use them across services. It solves one of the core monetization challenges of every AI company: how do you price when your costs are variable on usage, but nobody can make sense of charging by token?

From here, they can start hosting their own models and competing as an AWS for tokens. They can be the best provider of $OPEN_MODEL, or their own, and optimize for you.

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You'd be surprised how little volume of api calls payments companies get compared to advertising companies or consumer internet companies. Stripe aren't especially well placed to own this asset on a technical level. That doesn't make this a bad acquisition per se, but there is no magic stripe can inject here as far as infra/technology is concerned.

Agree, even in the payments space usage-billing metrics providers like Chargebee / Lago etc get order(s) of magnitude more data than payment.

Granted payments and associated ledges require a level of consistency that other systems do not require, but that is orthogonal to high volume.

Stripe also supports usage based billing... If you think Lago gets more volume than Stripe I just don't know what to tell you lol

Lago cloud ? Probably not , lago like sentry is more likely to be self-hosted .

Stripe completed the metronome acquisition their usage billing offering just 8months back , that hardly makes Stripe the largest player in this place when they are not even fully integrated .

Lol there is no way that self-hosted Sentry gets more volume than the SaaS version

You are way off here

Would be great if either one would be able to back their claims with some data. But yes, I'd also imagine that SaaS version gets more traffic, but maybe there are some self-hosted enterprise editions that get insane amount of traffic

Here you go

> Sentry processes 594 trillion events a year across 200,000 organizations.[1]

That translates to an average of 18.8M events/sec , peak is likely 3-5x of that rather than evenly distributed 365dx24h.

Even in 2019/2020 they were doing 500B events a year[2]. There are few single applications anywhere close to that scale, (it is nature of the error monitoring stack), certainly not outside Hyperscalers -Google's Zanzibar [3] comes to mind as definitely larger and equally complicated to be precise as its surface involves security.

The parent poster misunderstood my statement, I only said Lago is likely more self-hosted than cloud(like Sentry), not that some single's tenant self-hosted instance is larger than Sentry cloud (!). In terms of reliability they need pretty high nines - nobody would accept their error logging infra to go down, not that different from as payment gateway. While payments is more complex for precision and all the banking integrations you need to manage and reconciliation, error monitoring tooling is orders of magnitude more scale buy its nature.

[1] https://blog.sentry.io/self-healing-software

[2] https://sentry.io/about/press-releases/sentry-application-mo...

[3] https://research.google/pubs/zanzibar-googles-consistent-glo...

That is a big number... Thanks for sharing the data!

Stripe did $1.9T payments in 2025. That's 1.6% of global GDP.

It's take a lot to persuade me that there is another payment provider close to that volume.

Lago did around $10B in total API payment volume for comparison.

Yes exactly and once you factor in that a lot of sites have the Stripe JS code on every single page the total number of requests is quite high... Plus they do outbound webhook requests for dozens if not hundreds of different events so a single end to end customer checkout actually can fire dozens of webhook events (depending on what is set up for the particular merchant - it does for us!)

> once you factor in that a lot of sites have the Stripe JS code on every single page

That's rarely a hit to origin though? That's mostly cached at the browser, if not at the CDN.

It sends analytics events to Stripe constantly...

Processing analytics is very different than processing mission critical api endpoints. No response required.

Yes, congratulations on being correct but this particular thread was just talking about API volume.

That’s volume in terms of total payments, but in terms of number of API requests it’s surprisingly little.

I used to work in payments myself and I was shocked by how little the throughout is in terms of actual transactions per second. There simply aren’t that many payments happening globally at any moment, especially when compared to other industries.

A single games company can be doing far more API requests than the total volume of payments happening concurrently in the world, ditto for ads companies or observability companies.

At a payments company, 500 payments per second is considered high throughput and 1000 payments per second is a huge amount of volume. I’ve worked at games companies where 5000 transactions per second is low throughput.

The hard part in payments companies is consistency and reliability and “correctness”, the actual load and volume is embarrassingly small.

> At a payments company, 500 payments per second is considered high throughput and 1000 payments per second is a huge amount of volume.

I realise I live in a strange world when my first thought reading this is "Worldwide? That’s low. Fits in the basic one region, one account concurrent AWS Lambda quota. No need to even ask support for the 10k."

I mean, if you think about it, you can't pay a lot per second, most of people don't have money to throw around that much... How many times do you buy things during a day? Once? twice? Maybe thrice? 6 million payment uniformly in an hour is 1666 transactions per second, overall this tracks.

Makes sense. Probably how one would approach it during a system design interview.

> How many times do you buy things during a day? Once? twice? Maybe thrice?

None most days. But then some days eight or nine subscriptions go through. Guess it averages out.

Might be spiky though, around the beginning and ends of each month. If paying out wages monthly, and at the end of the month or beginning of the next one is prevalent across countries where a significant share of the population has both access to a bank account and sufficient enough income to regularly spend either by card or online.

Did this turn into a systems design interview?

Anyway, joking aside, I was mostly amused by what my frame of reference for throughput / service load has become.

Yes it's not very intuitive and surprised me a lot when I went into payments.

And let me state again, if you're a payments processor and you're processing 500-1000 payments PER SECOND on average, that makes you a very big company indeed (multi billion dollar company).

You can do the math, work out how many payments that is, what an average value of payment is, and what the TPV would be for a month. You can easily run into huge numbers that way.

And don't forget, the payment processors are taking percentages in most cases, so that 120 payments per second can turn into a huge amount of revenue at the end of the month.

Adyen and PayPal aren’t far off. Certainly close (~1.6T). That said, the gap is growing, stripe is growing faster.

Has Stripe announced they were the top payment provider in the world?

That seems like something they would have prominently on their homepage.

Stripe aren't even in the top 3 for payment processing.

-Global Payments: $2.8 trillion

-JPMorgan Chase: $2.45 to $2.6 trillion

-Fiserv: $2.2 trillion

-Stripe: ~$1.9 trillion

-PayPal/Braintree: ~$1.9 trillion

Adyen will likely overtake Stripe as well. They are at $1.4T already and growing fast.

Stripes fees are uncompetitive, even their negotiated rates, so businesses tend to leave them as their volume grows.

You'd be surprised how antiquainted many of them are. I don't mean Stripe or Braintree but the long tail of terrible terrible credit card processors. If I hear "Chase Payment Gateway" I shudder.

Braintree is antiquated. Sure it’s not Chase payment tech, but it’s closer to them than it is close to Adyen, Checkout and Stripe.

I shudder when I hear Braintree

More expensive API calls though, I imagine. It’s also not that small scale. Sure, it’s no Google, but certainly higher scale than most companies using them

>> monetization challenges of every AI company

Except OpenRouter sees all your prompts, sends your requests to different providers with pinky promises that they dont use your data, and is therefore a non starter for any company who cares about compliance.

If Stripe wants to spend 7 billion on a glorified reverse-proxy-api-gateway go ahead. I can here and now, guarantee to be able to reproduce all their functionality in 3 months, and for less than 10 million dollars. And Stripe internal engineering teams should be able to do better, as I will do it in the evenings only :-))

Classic HN dev: it's just an API proxy! I can reproduce it myself for cheaper!

Ignoring that you can't reproduce the widespread adoption and mindshare OpenRouter has already built.

That's what Stripe is spending $7 billion on.

What is the prohibiting factor to getting these?

Mindshare ? Nowadays people switch models like shirts, and providers faster. Its not Oracle or Microsoft...Those 7 billion are just a dropdown menu...

You can go ahead and build it then, then sell it for only $100M to a competitor. Should be easy peasy

OpenRouter is the evidence that yes. Its just that the idea is dumb. What you are seeing in VCs salving their own money, buying their investment out with the money they out into more successful ventures.

Look at how the same pools of capital sit on multiple sides of the market: the router, the payment layer, and the model providers... Its all the same club

Investor ---- Economic Overlap

---------------------------------------------------------

Andreessen - OpenRouter, Stripe, OpenAI, Mistral, xAI

Sequoia - OpenRouter, Stripe, OpenAI, Anthropic, xAI

CapitalG - OpenRouter, Stripe, Google/Alphabet

MenloVentures - OpenRouter, Anthropic

NVentures - OpenRouter, OpenAI, Anthropic, Mistral

AMP PBC - OpenRouter, Anthropic

Should be easy to build a competitor in a week, pitch to some VCs then have them kingmake you to a $1B exit to another portco then!

Isn’t being able to switch models and providers an advantage of integrating once against OpenRouter?

What mindshare? It literally is an API gateway with a rather minuscule usage that anyone can drop at any moment to use any other proxy or when providers forbid the use of their services via proxies (like it happened with Anthropic already).

How the hell can it be anywhere close to $7 billion?

When Facebook bought Instagram for $1 billion, it had 30 million users with hardly anyone else competing in the space.

I can still use Claude via openrouter. Anthropic blocked using your Claude code subscription via other harnesses but you can still use pay as you go API billing.

> Anthropic blocked using your Claude code subscription via other harnesses

Indeed.

> but you can still use pay as you go API billing

Indeed. Because OpenRouter is nothing but an API Gateway.

You definitely can build an LLM router with only the features you need (even the ones absent in OR!) for cheaper. Openrouter is 5% markup on all token usage. If you're a serious pay-per-use customer of AI, that's a lot of money.

> Except OpenRouter sees all your prompts, sends your requests to different providers with pinky promises that they dont use your data, and is therefore a non starter for any company who cares about compliance.

OpenRouter provides a Zero Data Retention option and is SOC 2 Type II compliant which means there's real penalties involved if they don't do what they say.

https://openrouter.ai/docs/guides/features/zdr

SOC 2 does not prove what are claiming. It audits OpenRouter controls, does not guarantee every downstream model provider retention or training behavior.

Actually, OpenRouter own terms...explicitly say they do not warrant providers data handling, retention, training, or security practices...and their Enterprise terms say... model providers are not OpenRouter subcontractors and that customers must assess those providers themselves... ;-)

Yea, I totally get why they want to be in this space (especially if you see transaction volume becoming more agentic), but why buy it? Why not do what Cloudflare or Vercel or AWS, etc did and just build your own?

Stripe already has killer APIs and knows how to build API infrastructure at Extreme scale, it still has developer cred after all these years, they are already Kings of multiplexing to different sources -- so why not just build your own LLM gateway?

My only guesses are: they want to buy the traffic instead of trying to organically grow it (but I feel like Stripe would get the volume anyway because of name rec), they want to buy the revenue and think they can dramatically reduce COGs because of efficiencies, buying the relationships with the frontier labs (who all dogfood their LLMs in pseudo-private on OR), or... something else?

That's the part I'm confused about.

Do people feel Stripe APIs are really that good? I’ve always found them unintuitive, tons of options, weird edge cases, breaking occasionally, etc.

I’m sure payments are convoluted, but I’d still imagine they could be meaningfully easier for the bulk 80% of use case?

Yes, Stripe is extremely good at what they do. Payments are complicated.

Payments themselves are so much complicated. Payments to support multi-currency, jurisdictions, countries, scenarios, that's complicated.

I'm friends with a payment docs writer. Holy crap are payments complicated.

I have implemented the Swift payment Spec and I can tell you having this abstracted in a nice API is so much better.

I mean. They used to be good. When they started out their docs were absolutely far above the competition. They aren’t now, and Stripe has lived long enough that they’ve seen themselves become the villain.

Feature bloat definitely made their API and product docs harder than the early days. Stripe Checkout would have saved my teams days, but I agree, they need to go back to their roots and make the 99% use case very easy.

Stripe has the worst payment APIs, except for all the others.

I worked on developer experience at Stripe for a few years.

What really happened is that Stripe's products used to be simple. If you're only accepting credit cards and only serving the US market, the API surface is extremely simple. Once you start going multinational and accepting different types of payments it gets much more complex.

For example, OXXO gives users a barcode and lets them take it to a physical location and complete the purchase, so instead of a system like Visa which can confirm a transaction in a maximum of O(seconds), you also have to support methods where confirmations take O(days). Building custom API endpoints for each payment method isn't realistic, since there are hundreds worldwide, and merchants want a single integration point that can support anything from credit cards to coupon-based systems like OXXO.

TL;DR -- Stripe's APIs are definitely more complex now, but it's not because of poor design, it's because they simply have to be in order to serve the customers and markets the company is now reaching.

I expect many of the warts in the API surface are there because they want to avoid changing things for fear of breaking someone else's business.

Stripe's APIs are very good. They could be better, but it's difficult to change the underpinnings of financial infrastructure. A lot of risk, little incentive to move, and you're designing something that has to last (and make sense) for 15+ years in the future.

I worked on this at Stripe in 2022. We were the first teams to start building v2 APIs and data models to solve exactly this problem. The first target launch date (in Feb 2022) was November 2022. It was launched in May of 2025.

My reporting line, as an EM, was Netflix, Oracle, Oracle. No one had startup experience. It was drenched in politics. The engineers were largely brilliant, kind, and hardworking.

I still love the company and believe in Patrick. Believe me, he deeply understands what you're saying and wants it to be the best it can be. But it was clear to me, even then, that they'd lost a lot of what made them special. They could maintain it, but I wasn't sure they could do it again. Banking-as-a-Service was one opportunity, Link was another, and now this will be a third. We'll see. (I say this with a lot of love for Stripe and Stripes.)

Coincidentally, I had a conversation with a recruiter at Anthropic and saw them doing something very similar. They were starting a new team in a new vertical and wanted someone with experience running an org of 100+ people. I would bet real money that it will be a fraction of the product/impact it could be (though still probably make money!)

> Netflix, Oracle, Oracle

Well that brings back some memories. I remember there was a third Oracle in that chain, but he left earlier compared to the others.

Your love/adoration of Stripe and Patrick seems irrational. Yeah Stripe built a decent payments API, but nothing particularly innovative or ground breaking. In recent times it's become pretty clear that they are aggressively shifting from a tech company to basically a marketing agency. They haven't been able to build anything new/notable in years, all of their new products are external acquisitions. All creative/innovative engineering spirit in the company is aggressively being crushed by new leadership who are all highly political business/sales/marketing people. The technical 'leadership' at stripe is a complete joke now.

They are certainly much better than the competition. That said, do not believe the marketing hype. If you want to accept various kinds of payments, you will eventually run into the stupid limitations of the payment system, and Stripe APIs will not abstract this for you in spite of what they advertise.

For example, redirect-based payment methods (iDEAL, Bancontact, Sofort) are a huge source of complexity, and handling all the additional states a payment can be in is far from obvious. Stripe mostly just drops them in your lap and says "deal with it".

I work for a competitor and can confidently say they have amazing docs. Payments are complex, and they definitely do cover the bulk 80% case in a REALLY good way.

We have this workshop thing we make most new joiners go through where they integrate our own APIs into a demo app and the number 1 response from anyone familiar with the wider payments industry is that we should aim to make our docs more like Stripe's lol

I think their API's are good on their own but in the payments space they are on a completely different level. I've integrated with a number of payment processors (6+) and every single time (without fail) I find myself comparing them to Stripe (unfavorably, for the other processor).

Docs are a mess, API is a mess, web portal is stuck in the 90's, things that are a form on Stripe are an email at best, a call/meeting at worse.

For one processor I had to have 4-5 calls before they would give me a key and let me buy hardware. I doggedly jumped over every barrier, worked with their shit docs, called their terrible API and in the end, <2 weeks before I was going live, found that in production over half my credit cards were failing to be charged. When I asked them about it they said "contact your bank", as if that was a valid response for why 4 of my 6 credit cards threw an error (with no recourse/message).

In <2 week I had Stripe hardware and completely re-wrote the implementation in time for launch.

Stripe is not the cheapest by far, but you'd have to pay me quite a bit of money to consider using anyone else.

This is why I would never invest in Stripe.

The moat protecting their high margins is temporary.

Competitors will obviously improve their developer experience over time, and then win on price.

Stripe are stuck. They know they need to lower rates over the long term, but since they already make so much profit overcharging existing customers, they are hesitant to do so, meaning new competitors will enter with a price advantage without a competitive response from Strioe.

> plus all new competitors will do better than Stripe on this, because they can design a brand new API.

So far it hasn't happened and they've had the time. Point me at an API better than Stripe's with lower fees and I'll be interested but so far I haven't seen anything like that.

> Tokens are simply a lightweight valuable asset

(Not picking on you here, you just provided a well-written peg for a popular narrative. I'm aiming to sharpen my own thinking here & perhaps learn something.)

This seems like a stretch given the rise of local inference, especially the Prism Labs rumors from a few weeks ago.

One way I think about LLMs is they are akin to fancy databases in that they are software of which you can ask questions and get answers if you ask properly. Oracle & SQL Server are akin to OpenAI and Anthropic, and there are analogues for MySQL, PostgreSQL, SQLite, MongoDB, PlanetScale, etc. (This is an analogy, it's not going to be a perfect fit.)

In that view, would it make sense for someone to say that their credit card processor just bought the company that makes their ODBC driver? Would anybody suggest that the TPS of their RDS instance is a lightweight asset?

I don't see this as strategic beyond the obvious idea that Stripe wants to get closer to AI, and they haven't been able to get the market to care about their natural linkage to AI (Radar).

> they can start hosting their own models and competing as an AWS for tokens

The financial pressure of doing this has caused cuts to core product teams at the richest companies (which Stripe isn't!). I would not want my payments processor to go down this road and to get worse at processing payments.

> would it make sense for someone to say that their credit card processor just bought the company that makes their ODBC driver? Would anybody suggest that the TPS of their RDS instance is a lightweight asset?

Would is make sense to say that their online bookstore now sells Ethernet cables, bidets, and delivers groceries? Sells _cloud infrastructure_??

Amazon made two transitions:

1. Amazon the online bookseller => Amazon "The Everything Store"

2. Amazon the online retailer => Amazon the Cloud Services company

I believe what Stripe is doing here is closer to (1). "We are good at high-throughput APIs that wrap complexity with thin margins. We did it for credit cards, then ~all payment methods, now other digital bits."

In this context, tokens are much, much easier than international payments.

Now: Is it outlandish for their customers?

Not really. Every engineer knows stripe as an engineering company. I don't think Stripe is what it once was, but it's certainly a generational company. You're asking engineers—who broadly have a positive impression of Stripe—to use this product they already know. OpenRouter gets the positive brand association (trust) of Stripe; Stripe expands into a new domain whose technical needs are extremely similar.

Appreciate your thoughts.

re: the Amazon transitions, the first shareholder letter lays out the plan to go beyond books. As I remember it, books were always only supposed to be the entry point.

AWS transition was more around building the platform Amazon.com needed to grow, and also to monetize the same platform.

Neither of these really fit with Stripe.

Stripe can obviously operate OpenRouter, they have the tech skills. The risk to the core business is that OpenRouter's growth path will distract from the core financial business and/or require a very different capital stack. (Someone already suggested Stripe scale out first-party model running, which can get very expensive.)

Appreciate your taking the time to respond.

Your simplification itself is compressing away the meaningful point, and then you're confused about your own over-simplification.

Stripe is not a "credit card processor", and that's not the point of OP's comment. The point is that being the intermediary between merchants and processors is the valuable expertise in terms of an OpenRouter acquisition.

It's been a few years, but I used to work on almost exactly this (not at Stripe, but we processed hundreds of billions annually). If you're a big enough merchant (or Stripe itself), you can choose to send a credit card transaction to any one of potentially many processors, each of which have their own performance characteristics (one may approve at a higher rate, the other may charge better fees, etc). All of this subject to attributes of the transaction itself (ticket size, geography, card type, many others). You know quite a bit about the transaction itself before you send it out, so you can build up routing knowledge to optimize for whatever thing you care about (usually transaction success rates or fees).

See how this starts to look a lot like OpenRouter with money instead of tokens? I'm not sure I 100% believe that's how it'll shake out, but there is a transferable skillset.

I hear your argument, I do.

I think the "money instead of tokens" is the important part. Money and tokens are fundamentally different was part of my argument (that I did not make well). It's not clear that it is a good thing for money movers to get into the token business (this apples to Ramp as well).

Banks are also intermediaries between parties (at scale, really between any parties). One could use similar logic to say that it therefore makes sense for Wells Fargo to start buying homebuilders because the home buyers will eventually be paying Wells anyway.

BankRate similarly processes volume of consumer mortgage quotes in real-time communication with lender APIs. They also do not have a reason to own a token router, even though their business involves similar processes to what you outline for Stripe.

Being an intermediary in a value chain does not mean you're critical path, or that it makes sense for you to be in the critical path.

Funnily enough, you argue that this is a natural fit for Stripe while a peer reply argues that it's a change in the business a la Amazon->AWS.

Anyway, I appreciate your thoughts.

> The point is that being the intermediary [..] is the valuable expertise

Yeah, all those intermediary businesses must be eliminated first and foremost if you want a better internet space. The current state of affairs is the direct product of just too many intermediaries sucking money out of both ends that could be spent on quality of service, which leads to lower prices, which leads to a healthier market overall.

I don't think your analogy is a good one. Yes, in some way an LLM is a like a Db, but with a fundamental difference: the data is part of the database engine. So when you are the middleman like Stripe/OpenRouter in this case, you are in the middle of a stream of data, which has value on its own - since people pay for it - and some specific characteristics (cost, speed, "intelligence", latency etc) based on which a router can take decisions.

Try this aspect of the analogy:

Anthropic/OpenAI -> Oracle

Gemini -> SQL Server

DeepSeek -> MongoDB

Qwen -> PostgreSQL

Llama -> MySQL

(These are approximate, just as food for thought about broad segments of the markets.)

The important axis in this analogy is that there are likely to be a small number of pure plays that operate as public companies providing LLM services (Anthropic, OpenAI). There will be some companies that sell access to proprietary LLMs as adjacencies to their core product offerings (Gemini). Many/most people will use open offerings without license fees (Llama, Qwen, etc.), paying only for inference (which may be local).

The caveat here is that more pure LLM companies are likely to get public, but I doubt that will be a lasting phenomenon. (Sybase, Informix, Ingres, etc. were also standalone companies at one point, but the market would not support that many commercial database providers.)

Appreciate your taking the time to respond.

I think your view is a bit too optimistic/nice in regards to Stripe, for this specific situation.

Payments have nothing to do with LLMs. They are two different businesses. Doing well in one makes Stripe not particularly well suited to do well in the new, other one.

I see this more of an attempt at capturing hype/eyeballs/attention, given that Stripe has been private for a long time, and that the latest valuation is not particularly higher than the one from years ago. It is a company that I really like, but one should question their real business and how likely they are to go public. Owning Openrouter allows them to insert some "story" about the growth potential of the company.

At the end, the retail investor will pay for all the BS, particularly around AI this time - not sure if this acquistion is the case or not, but I suspect it's a possibility.

I guess everyone is selling tulips now. For me, if this deal goes through, I'll find an OpenRouter competitor. I have no interest in Stripe backing this. I realize: I don't matter. But I'll continue to vote with dollars. Eventually the masses will matter again.

what are you looking for in a competitor?

doing research for my end to end encrypted router TrustedRouter

For me the big reason I use OpenRouter rather than the providers directly is the ability to cap spending. With OpenRouter I can top up by $50, change models on a whim and if some agent loop goes out of control and generates a ton of tokens, the most I can be out is $50, while using the providers directly requires me to manage accounts there and not all support top up based spending.

we have total, daily, weekly, and monthly soft and hard budget caps

Ok, at first I didn’t get it and thought it would make sense if stripe just wants to build payments for agents, but on a second thought your idea about “once buy tokens — use everywhere” is very good one!

Buying OpenRouter has nothing to do with APIs.

Stripe wants to be in the business of collecting a % on the economy at large. This is why people buy Visa or Mastercard stock. It is not because of the tech but because it's effectively a tracker for economic activity (you could also argue rent-seeking over the economy but whatever).

Stripe can then sell potential investors on their stock being basically a tracker on the AI economy. Now you get access to private AI companies growth as well! IPO time!

This makes no sense to me, payments are low volume traffic, their biggest constraints are getting business logic, security and transactions right.

LLMs are a different beast.

It's amusing that the industry allowed 'tokenz' to be a thing at all. It's like that scorpion and the frog story but we haven't even left shore yet. We've got all these other measurements to keep track of but now oh the MAG 7 needs some performance tolls? They don't understand the Streisand Effect nor the Pirate Bay perseverance.

> Stripe is one of the best API companies in the world. They know how to serve high volumes of latency and availability sensitive requests.

Do you have any numbers to back that up?

Why should businesses trust a MITM that can snoop on their LLM conversations? It’s one thing to share confidential data with a model provider if that’s the only way to get the benefit, but given all the hand wringing I see from executives and infosec folks about restricting who internal information can be shared with, I don’t see why they’d let additional parties have access to it as well.

It’s like we spent all this time enabling ubiquitous TLS to keep enable end-to-end encryption of all communications, but all of a sudden we’re now totally okay with having a 3P observe and record all of them so we can save a few bucks.

Stripe operates in a highly regulated environment and have earned the trust of the banks, merchants and payment networks. But LLMs are operating in a completely unregulated environment and I’m not sure the trust Stripe has earned for the former is transitive to the latter.

>Stripe is one of the best API companies in the world

If you think API companies have any value - Twilio (TWLO) is a case study against that.

Twilio market cap is $35 billion. That's a decent amount of value.

My understanding is that 90% of what companies processing payments do is: fraud prevention and regulatory compliance.

> To people asking why, this is a good lesson on the Collison’s ambitions.

Where can I read more on Collison's ambitions?

A lot of the freakout and "bye" posts on the OpenCodeCLI subreddit due to DeepSeek raising prices.

Stripe is a middleman. So is OpenRouter. So is OpenCode. Unless you own the data center and the hardware, how cheap can a middleman's tokens really be compared to the hyperscalers, without massive model compression?

Even DeepSeek itself is raising token prices. How much margin is there for a middleman like Stripe buying tokens in bulk from a data center and reselling them? Last i check Stripe do not run or own physical data center

I doubt Stripe can do much better here.

That's old economy thinking. If you have shit tons of data about the behavior of large groups of people, someone will pay you for it. HFT firms paying for satellite pictures of shopping mall parking lots in order to get an advantage over their competitors is old news, but it gives you an idea of the game being played. Why do you think meta bought gif keyboard?

Thanks for preemptively answering the question of why. And it makes sense.

But 7 Billion to start that process? That is an awful lot of money

shares. its paper. they issue new shares to buy the company. yes, its dilution, but its not the same as cash.

why did they miss the market that is OpenRouter?

You're asking how someone missed llms. On this website? That demonized them for years and is only now fighting the cultural battle to accept them as useful?

unless it's all just tulip mania, then they just spent $7B on nothing

Here are some things that are abundantly clear to me.

1.) LLMs are useful for programming

2.) Open models are excellent and will continue to improve

3.) Economies of scale and ease of access mean self hosting is out of the question for a large number of users

This means that even if the largest labs are not worth trillions and a large amount of the data center build out is not as valuable as the builders project and GPU/RAM prices plummet, it will not matter at all for this business. People will want to buy cheap open source tokens from a centralized trusted provider.

$7 billion for a business with little overhead that is already within their core competency and has strategic growth potential seems like a very good deal.

Unfortunately we don't really know anything about OpenRouter or Stripe's numbers. They're both private companies. AFAIK there really isn't much information publicly available about how profitable or not OpenRouter actually is, or whether it has a little or a lot of overhead. So I can't really say whether $7B is reasonable or inflated. It seems like an enormous number, and my hunch is like all the other enormous numbers floating around in the AI space it's probably inflated by the hype bubble. But we just don't know.

Broadly I agree with you. It seems like they have an in-demand product and there could be a sustainable business there at least in principle. But whether it's a $7B business or a $70M business I can't say.

What does openrouter actually do though? They buy a bunch of tokens from token providers and allow you to easily route queries between token processors?

This seems like the kind of thing that you can have Claude write in an afternoon for whatever service you're running. I don't see the value.

people are lazy

people don't want to maintain infra (ie adding new models all the time)

people want their queries to work without thinking

if a provider goes down, openrouter queries dont (ideally)

it's really not that complex to understand

Yeah, but who wants to deploy a model just like that. I mean, what if that model doesn't handle the same guard rails. There's a million reasons why switching models should not be a snap decision.

The back-up model is not a bad idea, but nonetheless...

i think plenty of people don't want to be forced to using just Claude and ChatGPT

My understanding is that it’s a common LLM API with common billing for multiple LLM providers. You can switch between LLM providers whenever you like, and the way you pay for API usage doesn’t change. You don’t even need to create an account with the LLM provider.

I don’t use OpenRouter, but exe.dev has a similar feature. I choose which LLM to use in a pulldown menu.

But the downside of this is that you’re paying API prices, which are much higher than subscription prices.

So, recently they added a way to connect a ChatGPT subscription and I mostly use that. But I can try out other models any time.

So this doesn’t seem like all that much of a moat to me, but it’s still a convenient service to have, since you aren’t going to set up billing with all the LLM providers in an afternoon. I expect there will be multiple competitive businesses.

Compare with what distributors do for physical goods.

Why a centralized trusted provider? Linux VMs are also useful (host services that are the end result of programming) and open source and fit for cloud convenience. I dont go to OpenLinuxVM to get my vms. I just get them from whereever. Aws. Digital ocean. You name it. Why centralize tokens?

You go to AWS or Azure, etc. These may as well be called OpenLinuxVM

Thats my point. There isn't a single centralized aggregator and there is very little value in it. Most of the margins come from other kinds of APIs. Gcp, azure and aws are not differentiated on openlinuxvm its just race to the bottom pricing

depends what the tulips are. tokens? private growth stage shares?

openrouter is involved with a lot of scammy crypto personalities. maybe they are the tulips people have been manic about for too long. maybe the collisons are the tulips.

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