>I need to say that corporate consolidation is never good for consumers.
replyTruer words, never spoken. I'm not sure how exactly this will screw me over -but I do know that it will.
Then switch. The good news is its’s fairly easy.
replyGreat advice, until all of the alternatives are driven from the market ala youtube, ala' ebay, etc etc
replyEBay there are alternatives (gumtree etc.).
replyYouTube there’s no real alternative because hosting unlimited amounts of video for free is a money pit that’s impossible to turn into a viable business.
If some big corporation wasn’t willing to subsidise it for some ulterior motive, it simply wouldn’t exist
What other routers exist that are good in your experience?
replyEurorouter
replyCan't find anything by that name
replyMaybe he meant EUrouter? But it seems to be an entirely different thing: unified API for models vs a token marketplace
replyCortecs.ai
replyOnly EU providers, seemingly huge latency, >2x pricing is just in no way an alternative.
replyhttps://cortecs.ai/detailedServerlessView/deepseek-v4-flash-...
https://openrouter.ai/deepseek/deepseek-v4-flash-0731#provid...
curious as a non-user, but what does openrouter have to do with stripe? Ignoring the corpo-speak about mission statement.. the missions don't really seem aligned in reality.
replyI don't think they have much to do with stripe. I'm guessing they want to round out their business more and include payments for AI since OpenRouter is basically just an AI traffic router that takes your money and provides it to the APIs you use.
replyI wrote a substantial comment about this a few days ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49324405
replyMy guess: your LLM agent makes buying decisions for you. Providers of agents can integrate witg stripe. Those using openrouter click a button for micropayment support.
replyThat's a rule but then Stripe won the market by having very friendly interface and minimizing the pain of dealing with paperwork for merchants. When PayPal (the worst offender, just hostile company) acquired BrainTree it was clearly a terrible news. When Stripe acquires OpenRouter I wouldn't be so sure.
replyThis must a purely aesthetic judgment apriori. Many services of value to me failed for lack of capital.
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