“> Model router is also a natural home for llm security - OpenRouter has the beginnings of prompt injection detectionMaybe I'm biased from the perspective of a "harness provider", but I think Model routers often have too little context to act as well-informed prompt injection prevention. e.g.”
“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.”
“Yes, it is awfully inconsistent today. They run some tests (accuracy table buried on model page) but they are sparse and only capture a single moment in time. I would love to see OpenRouter take this more seriously.”
“Vibe-coded content & design aside, you haven't implemented all their features, you've got some basic security holes and missing networking, and your pricing is the same as OpenRouter despite your company being 5 months old. It might not be as easy as it seems.”
“OpenRouter provides a useful service by allowing easy prepaid model access with much higher rate limits, and they also aggregate different model providers to route queries by price, latency, etc.”
“Could there be use cases where you want to run inference for users in your app, but don't want to host your own backend, user authentication, and billing?The user could log into his personal OpenRouter account, authorize your application, and optionally set a budget, all in something like a Stripe payment screen.”
“Stripe could help bill and meter at the user level for per-user billing. I would also think more SDKs/easier ways to add AI features (paid for via openrouter) into apps and websites.”
“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.”
“My guess is that Stripe is currently the defacto middleman for payment processing today, and they see 'tokens' as a sort of currency in the future, and they saw openrouter become the defactor middleman for 'token exchange', so they decided they want to be the middleman for that too.”
“OpenRouter basically creates lock-in through Stripe's distribution and family of products; it is much stronger within Stripe than alone. I agree valuations are absurd, but it is what it is.”
“Been using the platform since early stages and the ability to run any AI model with the same api key and same request has been great to experiment with new models and being able to switch models in prod with minimal effort.”
“They are the leading LLM API routing tool. Stripe is the leading payments API. They are betting on OpenRouter being as important to developers as payments.”
“Fun while it lasted. Stripe is close with the US gov and Kushner family, so the days of using Chinese models are probably numbered. Stripe will be pushing everyone to whatever APIs they get the most revenue from in return.”
“A company like OpenRouter that promises the cheapest tokens by the minute becomes essential on the low-cost margin.I think that OpenRouter and equivalents get pushed out of the market only if the froth calms down (as you posit) and winning models stay proprietary, perhaps with their own unique API surfaces.”
“OpenRouter’s “moat” is currently “why would I use anything else?”.Stripe has presumably only purchased them because they think there’s consumer-surplus to monetize here, which presumably will soon be giving me lots of reasons to use something else.”
“Which means you can do what you want with it, and it's all open source!Just the other day, I tried to have openrouter route to my local ollama, and it refused. Apparently I have to pay for this privilege. How wonderful.Open open (op)en.”
“OpenRouter, which I use, makes this easy for developers to do. Add some cost controls and other “management” knobs and it works great. But the market is not going to be this frothy forever.”