A single policy location for multiple models with usage limits/rate limits, spend limits all configurable using a common syntax + deep integration with account levels and high visibility into subscription/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/payments, the direct integration is a huge value add for customers, especially if you can alert on "upcoming price changes from your provider changes your unit economics for XYZ packages/sub tiers".

Similar to how Stripe is a middleman for payments across (fragmented) banks, they want to be a middleman for (fragmented) AI models as tokens are the new currency.

As AI agents/harness/human are spenders of tokens, enabling them to derisk from being locked to a specific model provider & allowing to (re)route to any model at anytime for better leverage in a single API, similar to how they are doing for payments.

paying for data access, for "deterministic computing", for letting the AI use online services. Maybe even micro payments for using tested and verified skills/mcps.

Example: access to real-time stock trading data, access to weather information, letting it make stock trades, etc.

At first I was confused why Stripe bought OpenRouter, but I think this makes sense.

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