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Stripe in talks to buy OpenRouter for about $10B
- woeirua 2mo agoI don’t get it. There’s no moat here. OpenRouter isn’t hard to rebuild.
- notfromhere 2mo agodistribution
- victorbjorklund 2mo agoFacebook/instagram/uber/etc is easy to rebuild. The value isn’t in the code.
- glimshe 2mo agoThe 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 2mo agoOpenRouters 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.
- glimshe 2mo agoWhat you just wrote isn't a moat at all. One is marketing, the other is a find/replace. A "moat" is something that protects your product that is really hard to overcome. Like a migrating your database to another vendor, for instance... Or finding your friends and the people you follow on another social media service.
- estebarb 2mo agoMoving money around is harder than it seems
- 9cb14c1ec0 2mo agoThere are in fact zillions of similar services. OpenRouter is the one everyone knows.
- otterley 2mo agoAssuming this is true: But why? And how is this valuation justified?
- prtmnth 2mo agoSee 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.
- anukin 2mo agoStripe controls parts of APIs for money movement across world. This is just a logical extension to that.
- random3 2mo agoTo ensure agents are paid through them and maintain market position https://stripe.com/blog/giving-agents-the-ability-to-pay https://stripe.com/blog/giving-agents-the-ability-to-pay
- IronWolve 2mo agoI'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.
- dd8601fn 2mo agoHow does openrouter help them get to that?
- Slartie 2mo agoOpenRouter 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 2mo agoAre 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 2mo agoThey 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.
- moojacob 2mo agoMakes 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.
- ChrisArchitect 2mo ago[dupe] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49027985 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49027985
- victorbjorklund 2mo agoCrazy valuation but not a bad idea. Makes sense for stripe to wanna be the middle man for AI just like they are for payments.
- shelled 2mo agoSuch great time to be pets.ai. Just a tangential thought from our times.
- everfrustrated 2mo agoAs 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.
- digitalhobbit 2mo agoNot sure how I feel about this. I'm a fan of OpenRouter; it's a super convenient way to work with a bunch of different model providers. Good usage tracking etc. as well. If Stripe acquires them, I worry that they'll slowly destroy the service, like they did with LemonSqueezy 2 years ago.
- autonomousErwin 2mo agoI think this is the first real step from Stripe into token economics. They tried with a usage-based product, but from talking to stripe engineers, it sounds like there was less appetite than they thought. Could have been for many reasons, but I wonder if owning the actual request layer is a kind of missing ingredient? If so many applications are just going to be token resellers (which, to be honest, a lot of very successful companies today are), one of the biggest issues is: if I'm charging my users $10 a month for unlimited AI usage, what does that really mean and look like? Do the other users subsidise the super users' use? Big companies can stomach this uncertainty if they've raised a tonne of capital, but if you're a little solo-preneur or small startup/business (which Stripe historically favour), you have to know exactly how much this is going to cost you. Else, if you're off by a few zeros, this will bankrupt your company.