| ▲ | abixb 3 hours ago |
| Curious on what OpenRouter's true moat is? It's just an LLM API routing framework, right? |
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| ▲ | rkangel 3 hours ago | parent | next [-] |
| Yeah, and Stripe is "just" a payments platform. Openrouter is easy, reliable and performant (like Stripe). |
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| ▲ | Nextgrid 3 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | > Stripe is "just" a payments platform Counterpoint: you can't just go to Visa/Mastercard or a merchant acquirer out there and set up an account on the same terms that Stripe can. On the other hand, you can sign up to any LLM provider and get API access on terms that are the same or better (since I'm sure they don't appreciate having a middleman and would benefit from incentivizing direct usage) than OpenRouter gets. | | |
| ▲ | GTP 3 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | Yes, you can get better pricing if you do it yourself. But the true advantage of OpenRouter is that, in a space where there's a new model being released every week, you can easily switch to whatever model is best at any given time without having to set up accounts with multiple providers. Or you can just experiment with the latest release. Their product is the convenience. Of course if you decide to only use a specific provider or two, then you don't need OpenRouter. | | |
| ▲ | rob-lag 3 hours ago | parent [-] | | But it's not really that difficult to make a clone of OpenRouter's service. What they do isn't really that original. Their only value comes from the fact that the currently have lots of traffic. And I dkn't think that their cumstomers are really bound to theur servuce. They could switch to a competitor without too much hassle. |
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| ▲ | ahepp 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | Will that necessarily be true in the future? Would we not expect that openrouter will develop the ability to negotiate special pricing? | |
| ▲ | surgical_fire 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | To add to this; payment infrastructure requires a lot of heavy lifting. There's a lot of regulations you need to adhere to, different payment systems in different countries, settlement, chargebacks, etc. There is a reason why not doing your own payment processing is a thing. OpenRouter may have some interesting things in streamlining the process of switching LLM providers, but it is indeed something easy to replicate in comparison to payment processing. |
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| ▲ | bubblegumcrisis 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | Also it's name has "open" in it. Which means you can do what you want with it, and it's all open source! Just the other day, I tried to have openrouter route to my local ollama, and it refused. Apparently I have to pay for this privilege. How wonderful. Open open (op)en. Open open (op)en. Clo-o-o-ooooo-sed.. (sing with Wagner flight of the V) | | |
| ▲ | Animats 3 hours ago | parent [-] | | Now that's the value. OpenRouter has the power to step on the air hose of any provider they don't like. That's Google's real power. Works for them. Between search, ads, and the "app store", they can crush most companies. OpenRouter's power is only in one area. For now. |
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| ▲ | BeetleB an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | Payments is quite hard, actually. Payment platforms existed for years before Stripe came along. They solved the problems the others couldn't. | |
| ▲ | xmcp123 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | There are already other providers that can say the same, some with very small teams and better rates. | |
| ▲ | nonethewiser 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | Yeah and the kids down the street are “just” a lemonade stand. | |
| ▲ | verdverm 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | Stripe operates in a very regulated industry where new entrance is difficult OpenRouter is commodity stuff, I've never used it personally and picked alternatives. The sense I got from people who said they used it was that they are on average penny pinchers. That does not seem like an ideal user base | |
| ▲ | abixb 3 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | [dead] |
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| ▲ | meric_ 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| OpenRouter is already the entrenched go-to router tbh. There's competitors (Vercel) but they're already well known. Stripe can also make them more competitive because they can waive / profit off the transaction cost. Considering stripe takes like a 3% fee, and the openrouter markup is 5%, that's a pretty big boost. Now is that enough revenue to earn back 7B.... I'm not too sure. I guess they're betting realy big that these sorts of model routers will gain explosive token usage in the future |
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| ▲ | aleqs 2 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | I don't get the 'transaction fee reduction' arguments. Yeah they can reduce the fee, which in turn reduces profit margin... any other product/service in a similar position can do the same... it's not some sort of free win | | | |
| ▲ | scrollop 3 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | And trustedrouter which is a bit cheaper and more private | | |
| ▲ | johndough 3 hours ago | parent [-] | | Doesn't TrustedRouter cost more than OpenRouter? (5.5% markup vs 5%) Also, TrustedRouter's website is full of slop, which does not inspire much confidence. |
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| ▲ | glerk 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| I presume they are sitting on a lot of usage data and will be able to roll out efficient auto-routing based on it. There is a huge demand for this as most users are overwhelmed by provider options and just want to route to the best/cheapest model based on the task. |
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| ▲ | BeetleB an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| They have enough customers to have leverage against providers. As an example, if they decide they can be "punished" if they claim ZDR but lie about it. |
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| ▲ | hgoel 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| I think it's kind of like what GitHub has despite getting rid of the quota system for Copilot: existing customers that are already setup to deal with them. In this case I imagine that OpenRouter's moat is going to be that businesses that already use Stripe will have a lower bar to choosing OpenRouter to provide the AI access, and clean integration with Stripe to pay for stuff like AI support bots. |
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| ▲ | dzink 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| As with Cursor it's the data - all the prompts and responses that can be used to train AI models. Getting a head start on that at the pace of current development costs. |
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| ▲ | jm4 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| They are the leading LLM API routing tool. Stripe is the leading payments API. They are betting on OpenRouter being as important to developers as payments. Both let them take a small percentage of a shitload of transactions. Being the goto service for APIs and executing well is the moat. Someone else would have to beat the volume leader on price or beat them on execution. Good luck. The only realistic competitors would be Amazon, Google or Microsoft and none have shown any interest so far. |
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| ▲ | roncesvalles 3 hours ago | parent [-] | | I don't understand why one would let a router handle their LLM request (other than for routing it to the cheapest inference provider for open models). When I build an application that uses LLMs, it's tuned and tested for a specific model only. LLMs are not really drop-in replacements of each other, even different versions of the same series. The pertinent question isn't why OpenRouter but why a router company is worth 7B. | | |
| ▲ | jm4 3 hours ago | parent [-] | | You can use one key for multiple models, you can have many keys with a budget on each, you can manage all your keys in one piece of glass, you don't have to deal with the upstream vendors directly just to name a few. These are all things that may be important to developers. I can't even get an OpenAI API key because those morons can't get their phone verification to work properly. OpenRouter is the only way I can use their models. |
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| ▲ | Arshad-Talpur 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| I dont know exactly but dont you think 90% of Vertical AI Companies are doing same? |
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| ▲ | petesergeant 3 hours ago | parent | prev [-] |
| OpenRouter’s “moat” is currently “why would I use anything else?”. Stripe has presumably only purchased them because they think there’s consumer-surplus to monetize here, which presumably will soon be giving me lots of reasons to use something else. |
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| ▲ | tomjakubowski an hour ago | parent | next [-] | | It isn't clear to me what advantages OpenRouter has over running a similar router-aggregator locally for ~free. I guess they have stronger bargaining power than a solo engineer or small startup, and can therefore negotiate volume discounts with model providers. The question is if those discounts let them offer cheaper rates than a local router-aggregator even after the markup. And if they can do that, then OpenRouter is undercutting the providers themselves on price, which I would imagine the providers would not want to see. | |
| ▲ | xmcp123 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | Because the others are cheaper | | |
| ▲ | petesergeant 17 minutes ago | parent | next [-] | | Which other aggregators that have anywhere near the model selection are cheaper? | |
| ▲ | LPisGood 3 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | The others have to charge a payment processing fee and take some profits. |
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| ▲ | bellowsgulch 3 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | OpenCode Go is too good to be true, and I suspect it won't last, like GitHub Copilot. |
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