alt Hacker NewsOpenRouter is joining Stripe
Previously: Stripe will reportedly acquire OpenRouter for $7B+ https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49323381
Comments
7 million would sound fair to me. 7 billion? Explain yourself.
I love that they won as a remote team and no constant hype about revenue.
Middleman company buying middleman company. Makes sense.
Love openrouter, excited for future feature development!
Here's Stripe's letter to investors explaining its acquisition of OpenRouter (LEAKED)
Just a reminder that cortecs.ai exists. Pretty much the same as OpenRouter but build in Europe.
So what'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!
Reminds me of eBay acquiring Skype
Shut up and take my money (via Stripe)!
Congratulation to all who exit at $7b after 3 years, but I have only one question: what problem does this acquisition fix? Did OR lack infrastructure? experience? what was the main drive, other than money, for sale?
Because after PayPal, Stripe is the biggest graveyard of frozen accounts who would be otherwise perfectly fine, but some AI decided that this card from this country at this price = send the account to null.
So while before you had comfort of using OR, right now you will have Stripe emps and their AI overseeing your queries. And don't get me wrong - Stripe will love you! But once someone pulls the lever - good luck getting at least explanation why they had to boot you out. I never heard of an account being reinstated. This will be like this, only your queries instead of CC charges, will be inspected.
I don't see how this is beneficial to anyone, esp. OR users. RIP OpenRouter.
It's honestly insane how valuable so many startups end up being just from AI, wonder if therels ever going to be another breakthrough like this for future people
Fees will magically appear between agents where they don't need to be
What could go wrong
good move by stripe
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't trust any infrastructure built on OpenRouter.
What exactly is "Open" about OpenRouter anyway?
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)
Kiss of death for OpenRouter.
In five years they will be struggling.
In ten they will be dead.
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's api spec? if so why not just sign up with the vendor directly?
Absolutely nuts to me that a front end aggregator of ai vendors — basically an proxy — plus telemetry is worth 7B
What 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
Amazing. Huge congrats to the Open Router team
I would guess the real value of the position Openrouter has in the ecosystem is that they can intercept all data and sell training data from many people, training data that is about as directly relevant for training as it can get. They would not need to log all your data for this, "sampling" is enough, and might in fact be even better sampled.
Note: this would include both the request, the response, and competitive responses. This would be very high quality training data.
Now at the current point they're sporting and make this data sampling option opt-out, and indeed they do. By default, they collect your data.
Model companies will pay a lot for this, especially now, more than customers will ever give to openrouter. Think about this: this is a constant stream of data of exactly what people and companies do with AI models, for all models, updating LIVE.
Second, they can provide "competitive intelligence" as well, telling models live how well they're doing and what exactly their strong and weak points are, and in what distribution of token requests this results.
There may even be financial companies that pay for this data.
so basically anybody who uses openrouter from now on is going to have all their data exfiltrated to stripe and then to all the banks/insurance companies... when I read the article that's what I think is going on and it doesn't smell good....
Previously: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49323381
> Today, we are excited to announce that we are...
Why do they always start with this. Every single one of them. You dont even want to read anything after that. Its the same "Blah blah nothing will change you will get the best of both worlds blah blah"
This is before Stripe completing their acquisition of PayPal (which will happen). [0]
Maybe there is some plan to pump Stripe's valuation to over $1TN before an IPO.
Who knows.
[0] https://www.reuters.com/business/finance/stripe-advent-offer...
glad I never used them now
Woah now also a 75perc discount on OpenRouter for flash 3.7. Is it really the same product (speed? and up time)? Why would Google do that?
> For years, OpenRouter has been called “Stripe for LLMs.”
holy crap, save some butter for the bread omg
Why stripe page? The money... LOL
aaand they took crypto payments offline. Meaning all accounts will need some form of KYC since you go through stripe.
I don't see the use for open router, I can switch API providers without any hassle with just a couple of lines of code and a drop down. Good for them and for those who milk the AI bubble
good
nice!
As a final customer, I hate so much stripe that I'm disappointed that they will be able to impose their shitty rules and business logics to OpenRouter...
> We are the best way to discover and use any AI model
He says it like it’s a huge accomplishment that he achieved when it’s an opinion about something trivial
hahahhaha
There should be a ban on using Open* for for-profit VC-backed companies.
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That’s great for the team. Though as a user of openrouter, I am worried that the much larger company will soon find ways to enshittify it :S
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If you're looking for a privacy protecting version of OpenRouter, my friend Joseph Perla made trustedrouter.com.
It's a pretty slick system and if you'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.