OpenRouter is joining Stripe

Shut up and take my money (via Stripe)!

Fees will magically appear between agents where they don't need to be

What could go wrong

Kiss of death for OpenRouter.

In five years they will be struggling.

In ten they will be dead.

aaand they took crypto payments offline. Meaning all accounts will need some form of KYC since you go through stripe.

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.

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.

Amazing. Huge congrats to the Open Router team

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

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...

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

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....

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

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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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Congrats!

Wow, that's a win-win! OpenRouter makes things a breeze.

Going through the openrouter team - turns out I know the CEO from an exchange trip we did several years ago (Oxford/Stanford)! Congrats Alex and team!