Comment by TZubiri | Hacker News Reader

Comment by TZubiri | Hacker News Reader

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Is that 100M of openrouter revenue? Or money that flows through openrouter? If the latter, 100M$ annualized looks like very little. It's as if a bank said that it has 100M$ of annual transfers, instead of 100M in revenue from bank fees and such.

Hard to think of any type of company that can do the topline meme as effectively as a compute aggregator proxy. Almost like a bitcoin pool mining company counting their shared miners.

Really? 100M annual? That HAS to be profit, it can't be this crazy.

EDIT: From their website, they say they have 200T monthly tokens, at 10 cents per M token ( optimistic average between free tokens and expensive tokens) that's 20M$/month, which is roughly 240M$.

Bonus track: here's chatgpt completely fumbling the above very simple calculation

https://chatgpt.com/share/6a85f831-9118-83e9-8a06-d32195c557...

I don't doubt the chinese bootleg product that openrouter is peddling is even worse than that.

We are in a bubble confirmed.

Sorry for the negativity, but this is highly bearish news.

We are in a bubble, but you are looking at this in the wrong way. OpenRouter basically creates lock-in through Stripe's distribution and family of products; it is much stronger within Stripe than alone. I agree valuations are absurd, but it is what it is. But if we have to go through a bubble for a16z to crash and burn, I am all for it.

So customers use OpenRouter to avoid lock-in to specific model providers, and in doing so they lock-in into openrouter's aggregation API?

Lock-in to what exactly? A string(string) function without any further restrictions? Note that aggregator users will not use more specific parameter features (because those vary by vendor), or they escape the aggregator and lock-in directly string(string, vendorOptions={"openAI.logprobs":true})

Selling vendor lock-in to vendor lock-in avoidant customers sounds like a losing proposition, like trying to beat competition on price and undercutting, which is a thing openrouter does too btw, the main reason people use these products is to get cheaper prices. I don't think 2$/M tokens is expensive, and I don't think those that try to cut costs are going to win, whether devs cutting token costs, or small business owners with 5 employees who look at AI as a way to fire 2 of them. I get that the other end of the spectrum is overspending and tokenmaxxing, but the conclusion is that extremes are bad? Nothing new here.

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