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Comment by aleqs | Hacker News Reader

That's what OpenRouter already does, so the Stripe value add here is still unclear

Not OP, but I could see the vision. Right now OpenRouter is developer-paid with no way to pass costs onto the end user. Stripe could help bill and meter at the user level for per-user billing. I would also think more SDKs/easier ways to add AI features (paid for via openrouter) into apps and websites.

Open router supports per-request usage metering, as well as per-key. Building user-level metering from this is trivial, and there are many implementations of this out there. Supporting per-user first-class is trivial considering Open router already has per-request and already supports per-request attribution. How important that is, is a big question, but definitely not something that requires Stripe to build.

Could there be use cases where you want to run inference for users in your app, but don't want to host your own backend, user authentication, and billing?

The user could log into his personal OpenRouter account, authorize your application, and optionally set a budget, all in something like a Stripe payment screen.

> The user could log into his personal OpenRouter account, authorize your application, and optionally set a budget, all in something like a Stripe payment screen.

Like standard oauth?

https://openrouter.ai/docs/guides/overview/auth/oauth

Good point, just needs an user friendly flow to sign up and set the budget in a way that is more similar to Stripe checkout than regular account creation.

OpenRouter already supports this, requests return their exact cost.

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