| ▲ | arw0n 3 hours ago | |
I love their product and use them myself. But where's the value proposition for investors? Unless they get purchased by one of the large cloud providers, they will get pushed out of the market sooner or later. What's the value proposition for the typical AWS startup to go with openrouter, if Amazon offers similar rates with direct integration into all their other offerings? The only reason OpenRouter can exist at the moment is because we are in the wild-west phase of this technology, and lots of people and companies are exploring. In 5 years they will have to have transformed their business fundamentally, or go the way of the dinosaurs. | ||
| ▲ | sowbug an hour ago | parent | next [-] | |
If you believe there will be lots of LLM providers in the future, then OpenRouter could be a DoorDash play. Established restaurants didn't need DoorDash because they were already on everyone's speed dial. But new or small restaurants couldn't afford to advertise or maintain a team of delivery people. DoorDash created a two-sided marketplace that made it a lot easier for new entrants to bootstrap. Today even the established restaurants have to pay them their tithe because hungry people have learned to start with the DoorDash app. A bit of a prisoner's dilemma. If OpenRouter plays its cards right and gets very lucky, a large number of people will configure their hungry LLM clients to start with OpenRouter, and then LLM providers will have to join the marketplace or else miss out on all those customers. | ||
| ▲ | pizzly an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-] | |
AWS does not provide nearly as many different models as OpenRouter. Perhaps they have an incentive to not do that, move slower as a big company or more legal risks to consider. If AI model outputs becomes commoditized then having one place where you can switch effortlessly from one to the next based on price might just justify OpenRouter. It could become a commodity marketplace/exchange. | ||
| ▲ | rat9988 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | |
They never claimed it was technically hard. Brand recognition is their forte. They found out there is a need, developped a product around it. | ||
| ▲ | rsalus 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | |
functionally they operate as a marketplace for cloud providers. I feel like there is value there, especially as API costs rise and companies explore cost-saving/efficiency. IMO, this is a particularly attractive value prop in the SMB space, where it is common to interoperate between multiple SaaS/software stacks. | ||
| ▲ | brianwawok 3 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | |
Yah I don’t think they have a long term play without a pivot | ||