| ▲ | Stripe in talks to buy OpenRouter for about $10B(twitter.com) |
| 38 points by julien_c 21 hours ago | 21 comments |
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| ▲ | IronWolve 20 hours ago | parent | next [-] |
| I've used openrouter, they work well, it was easy to use. Swipe wants to be used for agent payments, seems like a good match for them. |
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| ▲ | dd8601fn 13 hours ago | parent [-] | | How does openrouter help them get to that? | | |
| ▲ | Slartie 13 hours ago | parent [-] | | OpenRouter is basically a payment system for LLM tokens. Yes, it does route TCP connections from you to an inference providers' cloud, too, but what is way more important is that it routes money from your wallet to inference providers'wallets. The latter is the core business of Stripe. For them, buying OpenRouter to become the premier channel for LLM token money makes perfect sense. At least if you assume that the current state of labs offering heavily subsidized subscriptions directly is only temporary and the future lies in people buying tokens and switching between models fluidly - and I consider that the future, in light of the recent developments with Kimi K3. | | |
| ▲ | dd8601fn 2 hours ago | parent [-] | | Are they doing something novel there? I had assumed they’re just reselling inference, where they’re “routing money” the way Walmart is “routing money” from my wallet to whoever makes Cheez-Its. Are they doing something unique from resellers there? | | |
| ▲ | Slartie an hour ago | parent [-] | | They are reselling inference. That is not a novel concept, indeed, a stationary merchant like Walmart does conceptually the same. Although since inference doesn't require any stockkeeping, I would rather compare it to Amazon Marketplace. But it's been novel for inference services when OpenRouter was founded. And nowadays they have a considerable foothold in the market. There are competitors, but the one everyone knows is OpenRouter. And since they do not need to maintain any stock, don't need to do anything with queries but route them through 1:1, the most complex thing they do from a business perspective is that they collect your money and route the right amounts to various inference providers that served you. |
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| ▲ | victorbjorklund 13 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| Crazy valuation but not a bad idea. Makes sense for stripe to wanna be the middle man for AI just like they are for payments. |
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| ▲ | moojacob 17 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| Makes a lot of sense. If Stripe owned openrouter, they could ditch the 5% fee on top of tokens and make money from Stripes credit card fees. |
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| ▲ | everfrustrated 10 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| As Visa/MasterCard stock price is partly a reflection of the economy at large, I suspect Stripe wants their company valuation to be a reflection of the AI economy. |
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| ▲ | otterley 20 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| Assuming this is true: But why? And how is this valuation justified? |
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| ▲ | prtmnth 20 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | See projects.dev by Stripe. My best hunch is - Stripe wants to get in on the infrastructure/rails layers being built for AI. They aren't sure what that is going to be exactly (nobody does). OpenRouter seems like a safe bet. | |
| ▲ | random3 20 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | To ensure agents are paid through them and maintain market position https://stripe.com/blog/giving-agents-the-ability-to-pay | |
| ▲ | anukin 20 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | Stripe controls parts of APIs for money movement across world. This is just a logical extension to that. |
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| ▲ | shelled 13 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| Such great time to be pets.ai. Just a tangential thought from our times. |
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| ▲ | woeirua 19 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| I don’t get it. There’s no moat here. OpenRouter isn’t hard to rebuild. |
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| ▲ | 9cb14c1ec0 8 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | There are in fact zillions of similar services. OpenRouter is the one everyone knows. | |
| ▲ | victorbjorklund 13 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | Facebook/instagram/uber/etc is easy to rebuild. The value isn’t in the code. | | |
| ▲ | glimshe 9 hours ago | parent [-] | | The value in social media is the network. People stay on Instagram because their friends and the people they follow are there. Open router has no such thing. You can immediately leave it for a copycat and hardly notice it. | | |
| ▲ | Slartie an hour ago | parent [-] | | OpenRouters moat is that a) everyone knows it, but not their gazillion competitors, and b) their API URLs and key are already configured in your OpenCode/Oh-my-Pi/whatever harness or agent you use. As long as they offer stable services and do charge the same API prices as competitors (or even less maybe, since they have the most inference providers on board, because OpenRouters' prime popularity also exists with inference providers) you do not really have an incentive to go through the hassle of changing all your configurations. |
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| ▲ | estebarb 12 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | Moving money around is harder than it seems | |
| ▲ | notfromhere 18 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | distribution |
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| ▲ | ChrisArchitect 17 hours ago | parent | prev [-] |
| [dupe] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49027985 |
