Openrouter is easy, reliable and performant (like Stripe).
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.
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.
Their only value comes from the fact that the currently have lots of traffic. And I dkn't think that their cumstomers are really bound to theur servuce. They could switch to a competitor without too much hassle.
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.
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. Open open (op)en. Clo-o-o-ooooo-sed.. (sing with Wagner flight of the V)
That's Google's real power. Works for them. Between search, ads, and the "app store", they can crush most companies. OpenRouter's power is only in one area. For now.
Payment platforms existed for years before Stripe came along. They solved the problems the others couldn't.
On the other hand, I operate an app that talks to (and logs prompts/meters costs) to many different LLM API providers, and I do not consider it painful at all. I have an AI agent to deal with any integration quirks, if needed. Mostly they provide OpenAI-compatible APIs anyhow. It's basically a no-brainer to go direct with the providers and save 5%, the great majority of the cost of an AI-powered app is no longer dev time implementing the integration, it's the tokens themselves.
OpenRouter is commodity stuff, I've never used it personally and picked alternatives. The sense I got from people who said they used it was that they are on average penny pinchers. That does not seem like an ideal user base
Now is that enough revenue to earn back 7B.... I'm not too sure. I guess they're betting realy big that these sorts of model routers will gain explosive token usage in the future
Also, TrustedRouter's website is full of slop, which does not inspire much confidence.
In this case I imagine that OpenRouter's moat is going to be that businesses that already use Stripe will have a lower bar to choosing OpenRouter to provide the AI access, and clean integration with Stripe to pay for stuff like AI support bots.
The flexibility is kind of what I'm pointing to, if I understand you right. Instead of dealing with Anthropic, OpenAI, XAi etc directly and having systems to handle user assignment, budgeting etc for each, companies just deal with GitHub, which they've probably been dealing with anyway.
When I build an application that uses LLMs, it's tuned and tested for a specific model only. LLMs are not really drop-in replacements of each other, even different versions of the same series.
The pertinent question isn't why OpenRouter but why a router company is worth 7B.
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.
Negotiations start when sales is done.
These were highly capable negotiators.
But most likely also good salesmen.
edit: Inflation does not account for the observed growth.