How can a middle man for api calls be worth so much? Their market share can’t be very large right? For comparison, $7B is more than market cap of Lyft, Dolby, and Alaska Airlines. What is happening?
Historically acquisitions have never really been good for customers. Time for me to look for an OpenRouter alternative? At least they're also as easy to switch from as the model providers they proxy.
No, Stripe's mega plan is to create a consolidated internet offering for internet-first businesses, not price gauging, the masterminds behind this are not corporate suits, rather founders that deeply understand business strategy - https://s-1.vercel.app/posts/what-stripe-can-become-broader-...
This kind of makes a lot of sense. While my first stake was surprise that a proxy is valued at such a high rate, But it really comes down to the terms if open router is allowed by their terms to see the prompts and responses, Then that's very, very valuable data today for any model improvements and other opportunities that people might be looking for.
Stripe seems to appear to be attempting to compete with the US Federal Reserve as the core dollar payment processor while also dipping into the same for tokens. Core value exchange platform, dollars, tokens, whatever. A bit of a less exciting version of Dune. “The transaction volume must flow.”
Perhaps the US State Dept. used it's strong relationship with Stripe to encourage this purchase as a geopolitical move. They've done so before with companies like eBay and Microsoft to neuter the P2P telephone access network that was "Skype".
That's not a very common pattern, to be honest. A bunch of people have been experimenting with automatic model routing recently but mainly as a cost optimization, since tokens for the best models have got expensive once you start piping millions of tokens through them.
I haven't seen much evidence that model routing is being widely used yet. I think it's still more of an experimental mechanism right now.
OpenRouter is a proxy, not an automatic router. Rather than building API clients for five different AI providers, you build one client to OpenRouter, and switching models become extremely easy. This matters when new models are coming out virtually every day.
All the model companies except kind of Anthropic (and even they half-assedly do) implement the OpenAI API. It's not an open standard but, like the S3 API, it effectively is.
And, to answer your question, no. The existence of a common API makes it trivial to change zero code and send requests to a different model.
It's more complicated than that. Lots of providers use an "OpenAI-ish" API, but many of them have subtle differences in things like tool calling or thinking blocks. OpenRouter normalizes the wire format.
OpenRouter does more than just proxying; they also aggregate providers for open-weight models, which has a stabilizing effect on pricing and gives you protection against a single provider's downtime.
no. i don't know if openrouter even guarantees consistent protocl across models.
the value of openrouter is it offers centralized billing. you can route your calls to any provider you want, test a whole bunch of models against each other, and you just get one bill from openrouter. switching to a new model, or a new provider of the same model, doesn't mean setting up a new billing account with a new provider.
I think that OpenRouter's goal is to have the user pick the model, so there's manual configuration for the user control and cost benefit. Maybe you meant OpenCode Zen? But let's be honest, "AI" is definitely incredible, not "hilarious", or "so bad".
Why would PayPal acquiring OpenRouter make it any more of a monopoly than it is? Not saying it is or isn't, but OpenRouter isn't even a financial company.
https://stockanalysis.com/list/mid-cap-stocks/
Not sure I understand how this is strategically aligned for Stripe but certainly an interesting comparison.
[1] https://stripe.com/newsroom/news/openrouter-and-stripe
That’s chilling.
I haven't seen much evidence that model routing is being widely used yet. I think it's still more of an experimental mechanism right now.
And, to answer your question, no. The existence of a common API makes it trivial to change zero code and send requests to a different model.
OpenRouter does more than just proxying; they also aggregate providers for open-weight models, which has a stabilizing effect on pricing and gives you protection against a single provider's downtime.
the value of openrouter is it offers centralized billing. you can route your calls to any provider you want, test a whole bunch of models against each other, and you just get one bill from openrouter. switching to a new model, or a new provider of the same model, doesn't mean setting up a new billing account with a new provider.
No support exists when things go wrong!
One of the only near monopolies that is seemingly allowed and it is even praised.
But who cares. Nothing to see here (as long as AGI is coming it doesn't matter anyway).
[0] https://www.wsj.com/business/deals/stripe-advent-in-talks-to...