I love OpenRouter, long time user. Stripe will hopefully be a good custodian.I just want to point out some features of OpenRouter that make it more than just a model selection and routing endpoint and that I find incredibly useful:0&#x2F; Default routing is to the cheapest provider, but they&#x27;re usually not the most performant. I&#x27;d guess 99% of OpenRouter integrations never tweak the default routing. Here you can setup cheapest with performance minimums:<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;openrouter.ai&#x2F;docs&#x2F;guides&#x2F;routing&#x2F;provider-selection#use-case-2-find-the-cheapest-model-meeting-performance-requirements" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;openrouter.ai&#x2F;docs&#x2F;guides&#x2F;routing&#x2F;provider-selection...</a>You can also stack model selection in priority1&#x2F; Using broadcast you can push all your analytics to clickhouse &#x2F; s3 &#x2F; snowflake and a bunch of other compatible destinations. Setup a clickhouse server ($5 VPS[0]) and send all your traces to it:<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;openrouter.ai&#x2F;docs&#x2F;guides&#x2F;features&#x2F;broadcast" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;openrouter.ai&#x2F;docs&#x2F;guides&#x2F;features&#x2F;broadcast</a>customise your own observability in your dashboards from there. Superwin2&#x2F; Model router is also a natural home for llm security - OpenRouter has the beginnings of prompt injection detection:<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;openrouter.ai&#x2F;docs&#x2F;guides&#x2F;features&#x2F;guardrails&#x2F;prompt-injection" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;openrouter.ai&#x2F;docs&#x2F;guides&#x2F;features&#x2F;guardrails&#x2F;prompt...</a>there is also PII detection. This will show up in observability as rejections&#x2F;blocks etc.There are so many model routing solutions (same with observability, security etc.) but they&#x27;re all 80% solutions - OpenRouter really rounds out with well implemented features that you need when deploying models at any scale and I gladly pay the toll.[0] not sure if these exist any more but clickhouse is resource efficient

That feels high if they were bought at $7B? 5.5% of $100B is $5.5B in annual revenue. 1.3x multiple for AI. No way

Someone noted they pass through 100 billion annually if I remember correctly, but they also take a 5.5% cut, so Stripe secures them as a “customer” while getting their money back over time. It also to me feels like an adjacent business aligned with sort of what Stripe already does to begin with, being someone elses middle man.

&gt; For instance, calling Gemini with &quot;search grounding&quot; isn&#x27;t something that OpenRouter can do (they sub their own web search in)It can: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;openrouter.ai&#x2F;docs&#x2F;guides&#x2F;features&#x2F;server-tools&#x2F;web-search#native-search-providers" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;openrouter.ai&#x2F;docs&#x2F;guides&#x2F;features&#x2F;server-tools&#x2F;web-...</a>It&#x27;s apparently even the default these days (which makes sense, as it&#x27;s usually better in my experience).

I&#x27;ve been using OpenRouter since relatively early (I build evvl.ai - an eval platform on top of it) and think that they&#x27;re selling at a good time.An underpinning of their model is that API calls &#x2F; inference are similar across providers allowing for commodity tokenization cost comparisons, but the providers are beginning to shift to non commodity features that don&#x27;t easily shift.For instance, calling Gemini with &quot;search grounding&quot; isn&#x27;t something that OpenRouter can do (they sub their own web search in), last I checked they weren&#x27;t doing real time voice models, etc.

It&#x27;s a very straightforward business model and they started just in time to become popular as there are hundreds of alternatives out there.I also congratulate the founders for pulling this off.

Given the costs of the providers I doubt that sharing the revenue is a win for them.They are fighting to be the one and only

Great product, been using it for a while.Turns out even a proxy can be worth $8bn with the right business model behind it.Users get an array of providers competing behind a single API, meaning they have to compete on price and quality not vendor lock-in. This encourages users to join OpenRouter over specific model vendors.Providers get easy access to revenue (and data) and new customers with little to no ad spending, encouraging them onto the platform too.And that&#x27;s all you need. Win win.Well done and congratulations.

A single policy location for multiple models with usage limits&#x2F;rate limits, spend limits all configurable using a common syntax + deep integration with account levels and high visibility into subscription&#x2F;payments related to meter usage to help understand whether or not your pricing model is underwater as costs change is exceptionally valuable. AFAIK each product consuming model providers without an openrouter style proxy has to do that work themselves, and if you are already using stripe for subs&#x2F;payments, the direct integration is a huge value add for customers, especially if you can alert on &quot;upcoming price changes from your provider changes your unit economics for XYZ packages&#x2F;sub tiers&quot;.

Aggregation behind one interface, just like the actual token product.

Every token&#x2F;llm provider already has usage metering...so not sure what exactly you&#x27;re imagining stripe adds here

Metering as a service?Perhaps stripe thinks metering is a lovely big market? A nice complement to their existing service. Plus a little AI buzz likely helps their valuation. OpenRouter could be a step rather than a goal.

IDK, that sounds like a solution in search of a problem. What would be different about this than what OpenRouter is currently doing with pricing?

I&#x27;m not sure that&#x27;s true. LLMs seem too unreliable for accounting.

At some point AI will be able to deal with the repetitive and template based parts of accounting better than accounting.Which is saying a lot.

I built modelrelay.ai that does this. Happy to give you an invite code if you want to play with it.

AI products are going to have to deal with accounting. An agent performs some work. It uses some models and perhaps some other metered services. Someone has to meter that activity. They have to attribute costs, apply the product&#x27;s pricing rules, bill the customer, collect, reconcile with vendors, and maintain the ledger.Stripe can use OpenRouter to build the financial and accounting infrastructure for every product that sells metered AI work.I think the analogy is ADP. Payroll for all the work that&#x27;s going to be done by AI agents.

There should be a ban on using Open* for for-profit VC-backed companies.

The open router team was good people with a good product. Hopefully they can move on with their lives

Happy for the OpenRouter team. Been using the platform since early stages and the ability to run any AI model with the same api key and same request has been great to experiment with new models and being able to switch models in prod with minimal effort.They also support fallback by default so you don’t have to write wrappers and logic to choose models, it just works with their SDk using config.

OpenAI&#x2F;Anthropic&#x2F;etc don’t establish the direct customer relationship.And OpenRouter can steer traffic away from those labs over to their own model.The major labs don’t get personalized data about the user to train on, since it’s aggregated.Which is just some of the reasons why strategically it doesn’t seem in their best interest to allow a middle person.

They already sell API access to the model on Google&#x2F;Microsoft&#x2F;Amazon cloud. OpenRouter is the same deal. Note that the labs are not giving out model weights to OpenRouter. They are just selling tokens.

&gt; and the only way to set a hard cap and sure you won&#x27;t wake up the next day with a $10k bill is via OR.I checked this because it seemed so outrageous to me. But it&#x27;s correct. Snakily, chatGPT first told me:&lt;chat&gt;That claim is outdated &#x2F; at least partly false now.OpenAI: Yes, OpenAI now supports enforceable hard API spend limits at both organization and project levels. You can configure the limit so API requests fail once the spend limit is reached.&lt;&#x2F;chat&gt;However, I checked the link it cited (<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;help.openai.com&#x2F;en&#x2F;articles&#x2F;9186755-managing-projects-in-the-api-platform" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;help.openai.com&#x2F;en&#x2F;articles&#x2F;9186755-managing-project...</a>), where is states:&gt; Setting a monthly spend limit allows you to establish soft spending thresholds for your project. When usage exceeds this limit within a given calendar month (UTC), API requests will continue to be processed without interruption. This feature is designed to help you monitor usage through spend limit alerts, but it does not enforce a hard cap on spending.That&#x27;s not what &quot;limit&quot; means!When I told chatGPT it had lied:&lt;chat&gt;You&#x27;re right. I was wrong, and the page I cited explicitly contradicted what I told you. I should have checked the actual text instead of asserting it.&lt;&#x2F;chat&gt;

They get paid the same either way, Openrouter takes their cut and passes it onto the consumer. And anyone with an Openrouter account has already escaped from their proprietary moat. So for those who have expressed a clear preference for provider-agnostic model infrastructure, do you want to just wall yourself away from them forever?And per the rankings [0] 18.2% of the tokens sold through went to OpenAI [1]. 3.8% for Anthropic though. Google&#x27;s up there at 23.4% primarily because GCP&#x2F;Vertex&#x2F;whatever they&#x27;re offering is a billing nightmare and the only way to set a hard cap and sure you won&#x27;t wake up the next day with a $10k bill is via OR.[0] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;openrouter.ai&#x2F;rankings#market-share" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;openrouter.ai&#x2F;rankings#market-share</a>[1] Although gpt-oss 20b and 120b are indexed as &#x27;openai&#x27; because they&#x27;re the creator even though they don&#x27;t serve gpt-oss via openrouter. But neither are in the top 20 of models this month, while Luna and Sol are.

Can someone help me understand why OpenAI, Anthropic &amp; other proprietary models would want to make their offerings available on OpenRouter?It seems strategically not in their interest.

Then switch. The good news is its’s fairly easy.

&gt;I need to say that corporate consolidation is never good for consumers.Truer words, never spoken. I&#x27;m not sure how exactly this will screw me over -but I do know that it will.

I don&#x27;t think they have much to do with stripe. I&#x27;m guessing they want to round out their business more and include payments for AI since OpenRouter is basically just an AI traffic router that takes your money and provides it to the APIs you use.

I wrote a substantial comment about this a few days ago: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=49324405">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=49324405</a>

My guess: your LLM agent makes buying decisions for you. Providers of agents can integrate witg stripe. Those using openrouter click a button for micropayment support.

curious as a non-user, but what does openrouter have to do with stripe? Ignoring the corpo-speak about mission statement.. the missions don&#x27;t really seem aligned in reality.

This must a purely aesthetic judgment apriori. Many services of value to me failed for lack of capital.

I&#x27;m not happy about this. Having used OpenRouter a lot and enjoying the experience, I need to say that corporate consolidation is never good for consumers.

It&#x27;s a mostly equity offer. Private capital is always more risky than publicly traded shares so probably less than $7bn risk adjusted, which makes sense for Stripe.

I manage our company&#x27;s model spend and build tools around it.The good thing about the developer experience is that it is dead simple to create keys that are time-bound, model restricted, and have budgets against them in an easy, programmatic way (also in bulk). Costs are guaranteed to be on par or lower than any model provider, so it&#x27;s an easy sell to the finance department.To look at it from the other side, Gemini is the absolute worse when it comes to key management. The labyrinth of actions that one has to navigate to generate budgeted keys for a team is not worth it and I still haven&#x27;t figured out how to manage the keys at a granularity I need.OpenAI and Anthropic both have what I would consider to be middling DevEx. Most things work, but only on their platform, and there are some weirdnesses, like the fact that anthropic disabled its admin API key creation, so you can&#x27;t programmatically create keys against a budget.

I am working on my own agent implementation (<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;usehax.dev&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;usehax.dev&#x2F;</a>), and I can praise OpenRouter for being seemingly the only provider endpoint that actually gives proper API for gathering available models and their capabilities (context length, image support, pricing, etc), reports exact routing details and total cost in the response, and provides an endpoint for obtaining current available credits (for &quot;&#x2F;usage&quot;-like command). So for OpenRouter specifically I could deliver a really good experience out-of-the-box (always fresh models and metadata, exact pricing, etc).You would think that these things would be standard fare, but they really are not. Other providers need metadata from a separate catalog, don&#x27;t report pricing, don&#x27;t really report available credits &#x2F; usage either.So yes, OpenRouter does have a good DevEx.

Speaking for myself (I&#x27;m not the GP comment): The platform &#x27;just works&#x27;, has great reporting interface to help understand excatly what usage happened when, and integrates well with lots of different harnesses.

You create an account. Pay money. Get API key. Use APIs.

They charge a premium of 10%. I would imagine that&#x27;s a lot of revenue.

Or rather, Stripe will find a way to make me pay for it as a Stripe and OpenRouter customer.

Good for OpenRouter. They have a great DevEx. The $7 billion is tad high, but Stripe can afford it.

&quot;to power the next wave of GDP growth&quot; is a wonderfully shallow but impressive clause.

It’s a marketplace with a markup on every token they sell. And I’d rather go to this shop, than sign up individually at the 70+ different providers they broker access to - even if it comes with a price.

Frontier model providers (Anthropic et al.) gate new accounts to impractically low rate limits and spending caps until clients unlock higher limits with cumulative usage, make equivalent cash deposits up front, or talk to a Sales department to work out some other arrangement. They are handicapped by the postpaid billing model.It&#x27;s an administrative burden to sign up very every model provider, and there are many independent inference providers now that serve only open source models.OpenRouter provides a useful service by allowing easy prepaid model access with much higher rate limits, and they also aggregate different model providers to route queries by price, latency, etc.

&gt; As things settle down and commoditize, the value of switching on a dime diminishes as people lock into their favorite modelsI 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.

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.

Read Ben Thompson to understand aggregation theory. Many of the largest internet companies, like Google and Amazon, are simply aggregators. OpenRouter is an aggregator of AI tooling. Stripe itself was just a convenience layer on top of merchant gateways (another aggregator). OpenRouter is so big they can negotiate special contracts with OpenAI for special rates.

It&#x27;s a simple marketplace and they control a ton of the demand side who trust them to find the best price and providers that work. The value is huge to users - one place, multiple models, providers bid for the traffic and the user doesn&#x27;t have to think about anything. The value they hold hostage against providers is gargantuan - nice model there it&#x27;d be a real shame if none of our users used it.I don&#x27;t see how stripe adds any value here (and I&#x27;ve had such terrible experience with stripe automatically breaking my stuff I am worried I can&#x27;t trust openrouter now) but I can see stripe wanting to be in the middle of any two people giving each other money on the internet and this is squarely (lol) that.

They&#x27;re selling shovels during a gold rush with a 5% markup

Ha that’s a really interesting comparison! I guess the difference is that OR directly sends revenue to model providers, so maybe they’re more likely to continue working together? But I can totally see it go the other way once a provider feels confident enough their users won’t switch away. At that point the OpenRouter tax, however small, will be a problem to solve.

It&#x27;s Netflix before the unbundling happened

You can save money and get higher uptime. Without it using a cheap provider for open models would be risky because they might go down a lot, but routers can detect that and instantly switch to a different provider. They basically take away all your exposure.The other thing is convenience and centralized security from using one gateway to access everything. It&#x27;s a lot better than having to deal with N accounts with separate limits and monitoring. And giving your payment details to one company instead of 20 is obviously safer.Investors like them because the pricing is inherently usage based so there&#x27;s zero risk of clients using more tokens than what they paid for. Guaranteed profit as long as they can keep a modest amount of customers.

On acquisition pricing: Why smarter AI models could drive up compute prices 10x (at least temporarily). [0]
This seems mind blowing, but the big boys seem to be behaving as if it&#x27;s directionally true.If compute is constrained and expensive, OpenRouter is what you&#x27;ll use to get around the constraints at individual providers.[0] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;x.com&#x2F;dwarkesh_sp&#x2F;status&#x2F;2084333160075055122?s=20" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;x.com&#x2F;dwarkesh_sp&#x2F;status&#x2F;2084333160075055122?s=20</a>

I use it because it makes A&#x2F;B testing different models really easy

OpenRouter allows you to have 1 API key to access
hundreds of models across dozens of providers.Can’t explain the valuation since everything in this space is rationally overvalued, but I don’t think OpenRouters valuation is that surprising, all things considered.

So much so that right now GPT-5.6 Sol tokens are half price from OpenRouter compared to OpenAI directly. Which I guess means enough people are using OpenRouter, that OpenAI are more concerned about getting those users to switch (from, presumably, Anthropic) than they are about encouraging OpenRouter to exist and long term reduce margins for them by competition &#x2F; lack of lock-in.

Distribution is a big moat and value-add.

If you stick &quot;AI&quot; anywhere in your product pitch you get to stick a few extra zeroes on your valuation that has been pulled from your ass which you then sell to feckless VCs looking to swallow the world before the bubble pops

Tokens are not a currency, tokens aren’t fungible and cannot be traded

Yeah, I mean, it looks like a network effect, but anybody can aggregate the models; rather, it is the switching costs in the logs and work, and the cost savings, etc.

Tokens are just a type of currency. Stripe is a middleman for currency.Using something like OpenRouter (or any of the AI Gateways) is better than tying yourself to one LLM provider that can rug pull on pricing or change models in a way you don&#x27;t like.The value is in the network effect I think. OpenRouter is popular and has a good head start over anything Stripe could build internally.

Are you seriously posting an LLM generated “analysis” of financial event.

PE is desperately competing other PE to get into the promise of some AI thingy NOW?Just guessing. The frenzy around popular, good already, and successful services with the corporate crap flowing from this acquisition announcement too is appalling. The &quot;what&#x27;s best for you, the user&quot; heavy emphasis when this would be inherently evident in any honest service forecasts the opposite.Some highlights from one of my agents asked for a no bullshit evaluation:&quot;By buying OpenRouter, they own the routing layer that decides which model gets called and at what price.&quot;&quot;Stripe wants to be the economic infrastructure for AI — meaning they want to be the toll booth and the traffic cop for the entire AI economy.&quot;&quot;... insider market intelligence that OpenAI, Anthropic, and Google don&#x27;t fully have. Stripe would now have it.&quot;&quot;The $7B+ price is absurd on any financial metric, but this isn&#x27;t a financial acquisition — it&#x27;s a strategic positioning play to own the platform layer of the next computing paradigm.&quot;&quot;140x revenue multiple: At ~$50M revenue, this is not a financial valuation. It&#x27;s a strategic land grab — buying the chokepoint before someone else does.&quot;I do not feel a particularly strong smell of &#x27;best for the user&#x27; here for some reason... More like the usual &#x27;how do we squeeze out more for our PE folks from this&#x27; kind of scent.

They get all your prompts, the LLMs companies only some

Could someone explain why these routers are so valuable and pulling acquisitions in the billions?

There&#x27;s the infamous post dismissing DropBox ( <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=9224">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=9224</a> )

same with cursor - which was submitted multiple times:<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=34423387">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=34423387</a>are there more examples of this? a bit of an HN anti-portfolio. good reminder to others.

I kinda expected it&#x27;s filled with comments telling him how stupid the idea is..

It&#x27;s the predecessor. See <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=38415092">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=38415092</a>

What does window.ai have to do with OpenRouter? I don&#x27;t use either, so your link confuses me.

That’s the difference between a priori and a posteriori knowledge.

that subject line is pretty bad though.(i know much of it is a crap shoot and easy to quarterback on Monday morning.)

getting zero traction here is clearly the path to success :)

What a good find! Makes me feel better about my projects that get zero traction here.

Alex&#x27;s first post about OpenRouter got 6 upvotes and 0 comments on HN
<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=35481760">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=35481760</a>

This has to be all about cashflow, right?Surely stripe if anyone have learned to harness the cash flowing through their system. Hell, they could be emitting bonds on expected token consumption bills!

Where it is already operational and available elsewhere worldwide. Unfortunately complex lobbying and Wall Street not being a fan of it as they’re the biggest loser makes it slow to get it done in the US.

Deleted. I don’t like starting rage baits… ;)

What open banking? I can&#x27;t even get a read-only token for my personal use to see the balance on my account and I sit two team calls away from people who cooked the API

Brazil did PIX which in that case the middleman is the government and everyone got to benefit from

would encourage you to read up about how the rest of the world has solved this

Every single Open Banking implementation I know also requires everyone to go through a useless certified middleman (eg. Plaid, GoCardless, ...) instead of letting people use the APIs directly

Agreed, though that&#x27;s not a reason to discourage building it or putting it forward. That&#x27;s more the reason why a protocol would be beneficial, we are ending up with price wars and middlemens everywhere because we&#x27;re racing.

One problem here with the protocols is the field isn&#x27;t yet so stable. Most people are copying OpenAI&#x27;s endpoint, and so you have &quot;OpenAI compatible&quot;, but there are always little hairs on it. Case in point, OpenAI itself no longer offers multiple basic inference options on their new models. Can&#x27;t pass temp, get back logits, etc. on anything after GPT 4.1. It&#x27;s not a total zoo and Open Router is pretty easy but everything is just enough a special snowflake that models aren&#x27;t a commodity. Maybe later though.

Feels the same - businesses from pizza shops to eCommerce sites will be arguing with not their credit card provider about transaction fees, but their AI provider (who supports all 3 major networks, including Discovai, Clankers Club Aierican Express

I rather have protocols be built and less middlemen PaaS.One great example is Open Banking. I would support an Open Router that mirrors Open Banking, unfortunately the Open here doesn’t carry the same connotation.Kudos to the team for succeeding in executing around a clear DX issue during the chaos of providers, though long term I am not really a fan of it staying as is even if Stripe gets to be the one carrying it forward.

Routing the AI traffic turned out to be a better business when you also own the toll booth.

Congrats to the OpenRouter team! Been using it since the early days — the ability to try every new model without creating 20 different accounts is still the killer feature. Hope Stripe gives you the resources to keep building.

I think OpenRouter has a pretty lean staff

Probably a mixed bag at OpenRouter today. Some employees probably just became very wealthy. Others will see what it&#x27;s like being owned by a different company with different goals. Layoffs tend to accompany most acquisitions within 6-12 months these days. A $7B price tag probably comes with some hefty expectations.

Yeah, and Stripe is &quot;just&quot; a payments platform.Openrouter is easy, reliable and performant (like Stripe).

OpenRouter is already the entrenched go-to router tbh. There&#x27;s competitors (Vercel) but they&#x27;re already well known. Stripe can also make them more competitive because they can waive &#x2F; profit off the transaction cost. Considering stripe takes like a 3% fee, and the openrouter markup is 5%, that&#x27;s a pretty big boost.Now is that enough revenue to earn back 7B.... I&#x27;m not too sure. I guess they&#x27;re betting realy big that these sorts of model routers will gain explosive token usage in the future

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&#x2F;cheapest model based on the task.

I think it&#x27;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&#x27;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.

They have enough customers to have leverage against providers. As an example, if they decide they can be &quot;punished&quot; if they claim ZDR but lie about it.

As with Cursor it&#x27;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.

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.

I dont know exactly but dont you think 90% of Vertical AI Companies are doing same?

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.

Curious on what OpenRouter&#x27;s true moat is? It&#x27;s just an LLM API routing framework, right?

Minor nitpick: don’t confuse sales with negotiations.Negotiations start when sales is done.These were highly capable negotiators.But most likely also good salesmen.

We are certainly seeing higher monetary velocity in certain sectors. That usually follows from real economic expansion but could also be due in part to inflation.

If you meant that generally: because productivity is increasing; the world is getting richer. Not all of it flows down, but some does; top SV salaries are up too. By a lot.edit: Inflation does not account for the observed growth.

Corollary to this is that whenever companies acquire smaller companies and lay off the small company&#x27;s sales teams, they deserve what they get. Looking at you, big company that turned my last one from nearly a billion valuation into a $20M fire sale in 3-4 years.

It&#x27;s just the same VCs moving money from one pocket to the other.

It is amazing how we watch from the sidelines these aquisitions and think .... why such big bill ? But it takes a good team to sell and everytime someone is successful it is because probably they have great sellers who believe in their value and demand a price. It is certainly not an easy task to get to the finish line for a startup and pay back their investors.

The software is &quot;easy&quot;, it&#x27;s the business and operations that are hard: scaling the infrastructure reliably; finding revenue sources with secure margins; deflecting regulatory and risks responsibility; billing and collecting on massive low-margin high-volume transactions; enterprise sales; etcIt&#x27;s a business line more suited to finance, law, sales, and accounting people than tech people and a pretty laborious one. That&#x27;s often the case when the tech looks &quot;easy&quot; but the sector only seems to have a few big winners.

My surface-level assessment is that building a router is easy, but routing efficiently is difficult. For the latter problem, traffic provides signals which you can use to improve routing rules, creating a feedback loop. More traffic =&gt; more feedback =&gt; better routing. So a lot of the value of Openrouter would be that they are the most adopted router (I think?) and so likely have the most data to (potentially) produce the best router. I&#x27;m only speculating.

I did almost all of that alone, for TrustedRouter.com

It&#x27;s hard.- They support 400 different models, 80 different providers, and an unlimited number of new custom agents. Every single model, provider, and agent, has its own weirdness that has to be accounted for. Tool calls change by model. Effort changes by model. Backend APIs (messages, responses, etc) change by provider. There are thousands of specific tweaks, fixes, hacks, that need to be implemented to make this thing &quot;just work&quot;. And you have to keep updating it all, weekly.- On top of that, they support providers running in multiple countries, which increases the legal, logistical, financial, and networking complexity.- On top of that, they need to figure out pricing and deals with providers, and ensure the providers allocate the necessary networking and compute capacity. They need to work with providers directly to troubleshoot and fix all kinds of issues, from networking to application.- On top of that, they implement multiple kinds of request routers. An auto router to route your request to the best general model, a fusion model to attempt the request on multiple models and pick the best response, a pareto router to route requests to the best coding model for your request.- On top of that, they build custom features that businesses and users want, like Data Loss Prevention (which I&#x27;m blown away they actually provide for free). Lots of very useful business functionality for managing not only what model and provider to use, but also limits on usage, filters, etc. They also implement SSO, prompt injection guardrails, logging&#x2F;auditing, workspaces, etc.- On top of that, you have to be very good at just implementing HTTP APIs. Most people aren&#x27;t good at it. API design is hard, HTTP is way more complicated than it seems, network traffic shaping is a black art.- On top of that, running applications and infrastructure, and scaling it 10x every year, is a subtle yet critical skill. No matter how good your code is, it&#x27;s pointless without working hardware&#x2F;running apps.- On top of that, they provide a generous free tier, which has to be subsidized, and is probably only partially subsidized by providers.Why pay for this rather than build one? Because there&#x27;s no sense in building one. There&#x27;s a reason restaurants don&#x27;t build their own factories to manufacture their own pots and pans. Their business isn&#x27;t selling pots and pans, it&#x27;s selling people cooked steak. It&#x27;s a bad idea to waste time, effort, and money trying to make things you aren&#x27;t going to sell.

It&#x27;s a fairly high scale, but yeah I don&#x27;t think it&#x27;s terribly hard. Negotiating rates with the providers seems like it&#x27;d be the hardest part to me.

Probably they want to use the userbase, not the technology? There was a heavy emphasis - too heavy for my taste so it bounces me back - about that they will do what is the best for the user. I think that was already there, Stripe was not needed for that. This is more for the benefit of others.

I&#x27;ve seen three or four others building routers. How hard is that really? The folk I spoke to needed only a few millions to build it (they claim). I&#x27;ve seen prototype of some too that looked pretty simple. Maybe the whole thing is driven by enterprise wanting the external vendor support?

I&#x27;ve seen a lot of comments here and elsewhere about why is a proxy worth $8b. It is a bit more than a proxy.It is a known brand for model routing and it has developed means to route model on their own and 3rd-party infrastructure at scale and without much issues.Why Stripe? Who knows. I don&#x27;t see much synergy but why not? If anything it is a way for Stripe to get into the market with agentic payments which may come to be worth a lot more than $7B.

It seems like a misunderstanding of basic economics to assume that the price for this would track FTE salaries.

On acquisition pricing: Why smarter AI models could drive up compute prices 10x (at least temporarily).This seems mind blowing, but the big boys seem to be behaving as if it&#x27;s directionally true.If compute is constrained and expensive, OpenRouter is what you&#x27;ll use to get around the constraints at individual providers.<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;x.com&#x2F;dwarkesh_sp&#x2F;status&#x2F;2084333160075055122?s=20" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;x.com&#x2F;dwarkesh_sp&#x2F;status&#x2F;2084333160075055122?s=20</a>

&gt; I like Stripe&#x27;s long-stated mission (&quot;To increase the GDP of the Internet&quot;).Also corporate speak. Their mission is take their cut of the Internet&#x27;s GDP. Nothing against them, they provide real value for that cut. But that&#x27;s what the actual mission is.

Well given the commissions of Stripe&#x27;s, is mostly about its own GDP.

I&#x27;m curious about the GDP vs. GNP of the internet :)

I get where it&#x27;s coming from, I like Stripe&#x27;s long-stated mission (&quot;To increase the GDP of the Internet&quot;).This version is dumb&#x2F;empty, and reads like brown-nosing Stripe.

One unexpected &quot;benefit&quot; of LLMs is that it is training us all to be even better at recognizing &quot;you don&#x27;t even know what you mean by that, do you?&quot;

<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.axios.com&#x2F;2026&#x2F;08&#x2F;19&#x2F;stripe-payments-openrouter-singularity" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.axios.com&#x2F;2026&#x2F;08&#x2F;19&#x2F;stripe-payments-openrouter-...</a><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;stripe.com&#x2F;annual-updates&#x2F;2025" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;stripe.com&#x2F;annual-updates&#x2F;2025</a>&gt; Stripe last said businesses on its platform generated $1.9 trillion in payment volume in 2025, up 34% year over year.More transaction volume = more enterprise value potential. More GDP, total rake goes up of said economic activity they facilitate. Middleman Moat, accumulating volume (present via Paypal, future via OpenRouter).

It&#x27;s particularly stupid given that if you look at where the tokens are being spent, the top application overwhelmingly is Hermes Agent. It&#x27;s more than the next six clients combined.Hermes Agent is AI slop &quot;ai assistant&quot; software that is being entirely developed by a bunch of AI agents. They are stuck in a constant whack-a-mole bug fix session because the agents keep breaking things.Openrouter is being entirely propped up by garbage-tier software that is only popular because it&#x27;s being endlessly hyped by idiot youtuber AI Agent Bros who are so uncreative and incapable of critical thought, they&#x27;re using AI agents to tell them what content to make.When people finally realize how bad Hermes is, OpenRouter is pretty fucked. And then when all the weebs writing furry porn get bored and move on, they&#x27;ll be fucked even more.What&#x27;s really bad about this: Stripe is so tightly tied to the credit card industry that said industry&#x27;s obsession with morality policing will force Stripe to start censoring openrouter.

&gt; Today, we are excited to announce that we are joining forces with Stripe, to power the next wave of GDP growth globally.This is some high level meaningless corpo speak.

The service has been 10&#x2F;10, everything has felt easy and natural since the start and continually improving. I often learn about new models from OR, and have been a happy customer for years. Kudos for getting the proper recognition, $8B is a fair price in 2026 imo.

So they essentially resell their enterprise tier access to tokens from each provider while also providing a nice interface&#x2F;dashboard for their customers?

What exactly does this mean? You can verify the pricing differences from their official API vs. OpenRouter.If you have some grand conspiracy, you should be able to validate it. 
Yes, on occasion, OpenAI has offered Discounts on their API.

Cynically, I suspect oAI is subsidizing OR tokens to manipulate perceived traction, since OR usage stats get widely publicized

&gt; please never change
I&#x27;ve got bad news for you...

Congrats, OpenRouter is a great product!I check it&#x27;s model rankings and prices daily. The charts are great. Please never change!On another note... I&#x27;m surprised OpenAI didn&#x27;t buy them.I&#x27;m even more surprised OpenAI is giving exclusive discounts on openrouter, essentially encouraging the few API customers they had onto a much larger, cheaper and richer marketplace.

I doubt it. One of the founders was on a podcast recently and they were singing stablecoin praises.

and pretty sure they&#x27;re gonna drop crypto currencies as payment on the platform too

This feels defensive and reactionary after Ramp started getting deeper into AI.

I am glad it’s so easy to code. All these tools keep getting bought, cursor then this, and I have been able to build my own replacements.

I love that they won as a remote team and no constant hype about revenue.

Makes total sense. Stripe acquiring OpenRouter is a massive DX win—unified billing for multi-model APIs will save devs huge routing and token-handling headaches.

In what way is Stripe a &#x27;high-velocity environment&#x27; ?

Stripe is a high-velocity environment. 
OpenRouter (OR) is a startup so might move fast, but unsure if OR can handle the velocity with corporate guardrails put in place already.Any companies that are bought go through culture crashes, and I am interested in how this plays out.

man, whatsapp was sure something in early 2017 though.

&gt; And as we grow, we will relentlessly aim to preserve the velocity, agility, efficiency, and talent density of the 90-person startup that we are today.Echoes of WhatsApp. Huge congrats to the team!

Routing seems to face a similar future as the ever-changing trends in controlling coding agents: you know, context engineering, loop engineering, etc. --Which is that OpenAI and Anthropic quickly seem to release a better way of doing it, in their own products&#x27; harnessing, and which third-party and personal solutions will only conflict with.

i like what you did with misnormer. it&#x27;s like pobody&#x27;s nerfect.you are right, there will be revolt definitely. i think computing power will replace a lot of things though.

This won&#x27;t work because you consider humans as a logical being (Homosapiens is a misnormer).People will revolt first should one have to trade physical goods (such as food that we need for daily lives) with computing power.It only takes a few people to incite.

Overthinking it. &quot;You have money and need to seem AIish for the stock market, we want real money&quot;. You notice they don&#x27;t do this deal in tokens, they do it in fiat currency.

Except that tokens aren’t completely fungible yet. But, I think we’re approaching the point where it is close enough to be a “proof of work” analog.

I think this is exactly the bet they&#x27;re making.I was totally confused by what connected the two companies until I realized &quot;tokens&quot; are basically a nascent, and rapidly growing, &quot;currency&quot;.

I hope not;there are a few assumptions in this future- the biggest one is - we will have to attain a baseline intelligence which is useful for everyone which is not true today. even fable fumbles hard!!second is that everyone will have to own a medium to use this intelligence (aka robots). like a currency is useless if you can&#x27;t use it.to me this is the least daunting scenario. all other scenarios lead to mass slavery.

It doesn&#x27;t make much sense as compute isn&#x27;t all that scarce (relative to other commodities) and will be less so in 15 years.

I hope we aren&#x27;t on track for this future and if we are I hope a substantial number of people rebel.This is among the more hellish futures I can imagine. Our worth as people reduced to how much access we have to compute. Gross.

I guess this makes sense for the scenario when we will use machine intelligence as a currency, maybe 15-20 years from now? - like I can pay 15 minutes of inference for a dozen bananas? and the banana seller uses those 15 minutes to do banana shelling or removing weeds from their farms or whatever i guess when robots are doing everything. right??

Well Stripe is owned by Thiel, I&#x27;m sure there is some nefarious reason he wants to see everyone&#x27;s chat history.

Pardon my ignorance but...why is OpenRouter worth 7 billion dollars?

If you&#x27;re looking for a privacy protecting version of OpenRouter, my friend Joseph Perla made trustedrouter.com.It&#x27;s a pretty slick system and if you&#x27;re building on openrouter today and are worried about stripe integration messing up the product, this is a good option to consider.Separately, congrats to the OpenRouter team. They are selling at the right time in what is undoubtably going to become a contentious market.

That&#x27;s either sarcasm as you are not a fan of Stripe, or actual joy if you are an employee of Stripe holding stock.

Oh joy! Stripe is getting to be an even larger beast! Happy day!

Follow-up: Somehow in all that I forgot the most obvious pairing. Stripe wants to solve how agents pay for things. They’ve been quite open about this. Seems obvious that any solution to that is going to be through the model platform layer - so they just bought a major platform layer.

Stripe is positioning themselves as one of the leading adopters of AI internally. I don&#x27;t know of public stats but I estimate they&#x27;re spending on the order of $millions per week on tokens. I assume they&#x27;ve adopted Openrouter and the majority of that spend is going via Openrouter. So they understand the product value, they understand the current gaps, and there&#x27;s also a threat mitigation. They&#x27;ve likely become very dependent on Openrouter and someone is going to buy it - so they may as well negate the risk to that. (Threat mitigation alone is not worth $7B but it justifies a certain premium.)They also have very complementary problems and skills. The long-term roadmap for routers is auto-routing; that is, turning traffic into signals into automated decisions. Stripe has a lot of overlapping talent and experience from fraud-detection and likely other products.

Stripe execs said &quot;we should own some AI&quot;Founders found out that they could finally afford to pay their medical, tax, housing bills if they said yes

And... How do they combine? I really curious.

One-to-many implementation. Stripe is one api to every bank. Openrouter is one api to every language model.

Both are the most popular developer api in their space.

One of the main real values of OpenRouter is that it is a single payment relationship for users that enables access to many downstream vendors. I&#x27;m not super convinced it is a good purchase, but right now OpenRouter is the financial middleman for token spend. It is also the centralization point for tokens, allowing for value-add features that are industry-wide, for example budgets - and I think that structure has parallels to Stripe products like Checkout or Identity.

Stripe has a lot of money, but not a lot of AI-buzzword compliance. OpenRouter is highly AI-buzzword compliant, but doesn&#x27;t have a lot of money. It&#x27;s a match made in heaven

In the event that the AI bubble doesn&#x27;t burst, Stripe needs to have a stake in whatever&#x27;s coming. They have time to explore and pursue specific strategies, but they just needed to make some big and compatible buy.In this particular case, OpenRouter represents a M x N bridging and enhancement layer much like Stripe themselves, and so must address a lot of parallel technical, dealmaking, accounting, and legal challenges.It may not be obvious on the surface because they seem to be working in such different domain, but they have to address a lot of the same problems in comparable ways and that makes it a pretty darn good fit.

Taking a % cut on top of every operation

please stop subjecting us to your Ai slop articles

Hm. This seems random. Other than the fact that they are both technology companies, is there anything else that they have in common?

I am somewhat mixed on this, I feel though having it be part of Stripe will make it easier to sell to my leadership as &quot;More Trustworthy&quot; than having it by itself

Love openrouter, excited for future feature development!

Clearly these products are being named by topologists, who have no objection to things being simultaneously open and closed.

Its sad that you gotta be a software engineer, to immediately get this joke, because its pretty good

It&#x27;s following the open closed principle.

It could be open in the literally sense of you aren&#x27;t locked in, you have free access to any model you want.Just because a name has open in it doesn&#x27;t mean it has to be open source.

It’s an AI era buzzword. It’s not a new process, e.g. when blockchain was trendy, “crypto-“ and “bit-“ became similarly popular and meaningless.

&quot;Open&quot; is a load bearing reference we all get :p

Not if you’re in a different domain, then it cannot be claimed to confuse customers.So if it’s a network router or a woodworking router, then you’re good.I can sells of red socks, and white socks, without getting sued by Chicago or Boston.If it’s in the same space… you might want to contact a lawyer. I believe Firefox had conflicts with earlier names like Phoenix and FireBird and they weren’t even browsers.

Would &quot;OpenSourceRouter&quot; be a trademark violation?I&#x27;ve built one in Rust and want to market it.

What&#x27;s with naming proprietary stuff &quot;open&quot;?

&gt; How would paying 5% of yearly revenue make any sense for an acquisition??50x revenue is also a crazy number. I wonder what happens more, companies selling for ≤5% revenue or companies selling for ≥50x revenue.

10% would be more typical. Perhaps the math is that OpenRouter inside Stripe makes it twice as valuable. You often see acquisitions priced on the value of the company post-acquisition.

OpenRouter already takes in around $140M in yearly revenue. How would paying 5% of yearly revenue make any sense for an acquisition??

Remember when Google acquired YouTube for $1.6B in 2006? That amount seemed ridiculous at the time. Its now peanuts compared to YouTube&#x27;s yearly revenue.

The 7 billion figure is not just open router&#x27;s current value. It&#x27;s also including part of it&#x27;s projected value in the future. So that 7 billion includes current value + value say 5-10 years out.

Let&#x27;s just hope the pitch wasn&#x27;t selling everybody&#x27;s data for training

2006 called and wants their valuations back.

just imagine that the money isn&#x27;t real and you&#x27;re there.

7 million would sound fair to me. 7 billion? Explain yourself.

Middleman company buying middleman company. Makes sense.

<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;xcancel.com&#x2F;EricNewcomer&#x2F;status&#x2F;2090133049291788434" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;xcancel.com&#x2F;EricNewcomer&#x2F;status&#x2F;2090133049291788434</a>Edit: ninja&#x27;d?

for you and me: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;xcancel.com&#x2F;EricNewcomer&#x2F;status&#x2F;2090133049291788434" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;xcancel.com&#x2F;EricNewcomer&#x2F;status&#x2F;2090133049291788434</a>

Any non X source for this so people who don&#x27;t use X can have a look?

Here&#x27;s Stripe&#x27;s letter to investors explaining its acquisition of OpenRouter (LEAKED)<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;x.com&#x2F;EricNewcomer&#x2F;status&#x2F;2090133049291788434" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;x.com&#x2F;EricNewcomer&#x2F;status&#x2F;2090133049291788434</a>

Why Stripe? 7 billion reasons to build a squidproxy

Just as the US deems China as a national security risk, I deem Israel to be a much bigger threat to my cybersecurity. Stripe has vocally supported Israel and I cannot trust any token coming out of OpenRouter after this. Their payment systems have been notoriously bad so this is cause for concern to me.Stripe is a financial institution that has strict requirements for reporting and audits by the US government. It has blocked payments for numerous different services for no reason. I wouldn&#x27;t trust any infrastructure built on OpenRouter.What exactly is &quot;Open&quot; about OpenRouter anyway?

So what&#x27;s the endgame? Typical late acquisitions are meant to destroy things. What will they destroy with this merger? Openrouter has no moat.

Congratulations to the OpenRouter team!

Congratulations to the open router team. Also: Praying for stripes imminent demise.

With this I am looking to moving my operations to Eurorouter. I am so done with these people (stripe)

I dont use open router so can someone explain to me how it works in that different vendors have different api parameters?is the selling point that they just give you access to a unified access in where you get to write each request toward the particular api provider&#x27;s api spec? if so why not just sign up with the vendor directly?

Shut up and take my money (via Stripe)!

Absolutely nuts to me that a front end aggregator of ai vendors — basically an proxy — plus telemetry is worth 7BWhat a time to be alive. I’m going to take a 1% stake in a bridge and rename it bridge.ai and sell it for billions too

Previously: Stripe will reportedly acquire OpenRouter for $7B+ <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=49323381">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=49323381</a>