I don’t understand it, but good for OpenRouter. Personally, I think OpenRouter’s value is somewhat perishable. In the early AI market where there are a jillion models and anew one every week, it’s great to be able to try them all without having to create accounts and keys for each one. OpenRouter, which I use, makes this easy for developers to do. Add some cost controls and other “management” knobs and it works great. But the market is not going to be this frothy forever. As things settle down and commoditize, the value of switching on a dime diminishes as people lock into their favorite models. And with the OpenAI and Anthropic APIs being defacto standards for how to talk to models, it’s easy enough to switch to another model every so often, as long as you aren’t doing it multiple times per week. The other alternative is that OpenRouter stays in the mix but its pricing gets ground down and down. If it’s (nearly) free and still adds some value, fine. But that doesn’t justify $7B. So, yea, I don’t get it from Stripe’s perspective.

> As things settle down and commoditize, the value of switching on a dime diminishes as people lock into their favorite models

I can imagine just the opposite outcome from the same scenario: as people settle into their favorite but commoditized models, competition for marginal inference cost will take over. A company like OpenRouter that promises the cheapest tokens by the minute becomes essential on the low-cost margin.

I think that OpenRouter and equivalents get pushed out of the market only if the froth calms down (as you posit) and winning models stay proprietary, perhaps with their own unique API surfaces.