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Comment by petcat | Hacker News Reader

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.

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?

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.

What is the prohibiting factor to getting these?

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.

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