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>> 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 :-))

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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... ;-)

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