alt Hacker News> 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.
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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.
Will that necessarily be true in the future? Would we not expect that openrouter will develop the ability to negotiate special pricing?
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.
Openrouter is fragile, one good competitor and they are at risk.
Or if one of the provider suddenly decide to forbid openrouter from using their api. Why would they do that tho ?? Well it's not like execs never take dumb decisions.
In my humble opinion, it's extremely overpriced. But then, it's just the standard with AI currently. Divide every ai company valuation by 1000 and you might get it's real value.