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Comment by marcsnid | Hacker News Reader

I'm not happy about this. Having used OpenRouter a lot and enjoying the experience, I need to say that corporate consolidation is never good for consumers.

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>I need to say that corporate consolidation is never good for consumers.

Truer words, never spoken. I'm not sure how exactly this will screw me over -but I do know that it will.

Then switch. The good news is its’s fairly easy.

Great advice, until all of the alternatives are driven from the market ala youtube, ala' ebay, etc etc

EBay there are alternatives (gumtree etc.).

YouTube there’s no real alternative because hosting unlimited amounts of video for free is a money pit that’s impossible to turn into a viable business.

If some big corporation wasn’t willing to subsidise it for some ulterior motive, it simply wouldn’t exist

What other routers exist that are good in your experience?

Eurorouter

Can't find anything by that name

Maybe he meant EUrouter? But it seems to be an entirely different thing: unified API for models vs a token marketplace

Apologies for the misspelling, but I do believe they are offering the same service albeit without many of the closed US models.

https://www.eurouter.ai/pricing

Cortecs.ai

Only EU providers, seemingly huge latency, >2x pricing is just in no way an alternative.

https://cortecs.ai/detailedServerlessView/deepseek-v4-flash-...

https://openrouter.ai/deepseek/deepseek-v4-flash-0731#provid...

> Only EU providers

It is though, if that is what you want

In the sense that asparagus is an alternative to bananas, if that's what you want.

That's a rule but then Stripe won the market by having very friendly interface and minimizing the pain of dealing with paperwork for merchants. When PayPal (the worst offender, just hostile company) acquired BrainTree it was clearly a terrible news. When Stripe acquires OpenRouter I wouldn't be so sure.

curious as a non-user, but what does openrouter have to do with stripe? Ignoring the corpo-speak about mission statement.. the missions don't really seem aligned in reality.

I don't think they have much to do with stripe. I'm guessing they want to round out their business more and include payments for AI since OpenRouter is basically just an AI traffic router that takes your money and provides it to the APIs you use.

I wrote a substantial comment about this a few days ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49324405

My guess: your LLM agent makes buying decisions for you. Providers of agents can integrate witg stripe. Those using openrouter click a button for micropayment support.

This must a purely aesthetic judgment apriori. Many services of value to me failed for lack of capital.

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