> Tokens are simply a lightweight valuable asset
(Not picking on you here, you just provided a well-written peg for a popular narrative. I'm aiming to sharpen my own thinking here & perhaps learn something.)
This seems like a stretch given the rise of local inference, especially the Prism Labs rumors from a few weeks ago.
One way I think about LLMs is they are akin to fancy databases in that they are software of which you can ask questions and get answers if you ask properly. Oracle & SQL Server are akin to OpenAI and Anthropic, and there are analogues for MySQL, PostgreSQL, SQLite, MongoDB, PlanetScale, etc. (This is an analogy, it's not going to be a perfect fit.)
In that view, would it make sense for someone to say that their credit card processor just bought the company that makes their ODBC driver? Would anybody suggest that the TPS of their RDS instance is a lightweight asset?
I don't see this as strategic beyond the obvious idea that Stripe wants to get closer to AI, and they haven't been able to get the market to care about their natural linkage to AI (Radar).
> they can start hosting their own models and competing as an AWS for tokens
The financial pressure of doing this has caused cuts to core product teams at the richest companies (which Stripe isn't!). I would not want my payments processor to go down this road and to get worse at processing payments.
Your simplification itself is compressing away the meaningful point, and then you're confused about your own over-simplification.
Stripe is not a "credit card processor", and that's not the point of OP's comment. The point is that being the intermediary between merchants and processors is the valuable expertise in terms of an OpenRouter acquisition.
It's been a few years, but I used to work on almost exactly this (not at Stripe, but we processed hundreds of billions annually). If you're a big enough merchant (or Stripe itself), you can choose to send a credit card transaction to any one of potentially many processors, each of which have their own performance characteristics (one may approve at a higher rate, the other may charge better fees, etc). All of this subject to attributes of the transaction itself (ticket size, geography, card type, many others). You know quite a bit about the transaction itself before you send it out, so you can build up routing knowledge to optimize for whatever thing you care about (usually transaction success rates or fees).
See how this starts to look a lot like OpenRouter with money instead of tokens? I'm not sure I 100% believe that's how it'll shake out, but there is a transferable skillset.
I hear your argument, I do.
I think the "money instead of tokens" is the important part. Money and tokens are fundamentally different was part of my argument (that I did not make well). It's not clear that it is a good thing for money movers to get into the token business (this apples to Ramp as well).
Banks are also intermediaries between parties (at scale, really between any parties). One could use similar logic to say that it therefore makes sense for Wells Fargo to start buying homebuilders because the home buyers will eventually be paying Wells anyway.
BankRate similarly processes volume of consumer mortgage quotes in real-time communication with lender APIs. They also do not have a reason to own a token router, even though their business involves similar processes to what you outline for Stripe.
Being an intermediary in a value chain does not mean you're critical path, or that it makes sense for you to be in the critical path.
Funnily enough, you argue that this is a natural fit for Stripe while a peer reply argues that it's a change in the business a la Amazon->AWS.
Anyway, I appreciate your thoughts.
> The point is that being the intermediary [..] is the valuable expertise
Yeah, all those intermediary businesses must be eliminated first and foremost if you want a better internet space. The current state of affairs is the direct product of just too many intermediaries sucking money out of both ends that could be spent on quality of service, which leads to lower prices, which leads to a healthier market overall.
> would it make sense for someone to say that their credit card processor just bought the company that makes their ODBC driver? Would anybody suggest that the TPS of their RDS instance is a lightweight asset?
Would is make sense to say that their online bookstore now sells Ethernet cables, bidets, and delivers groceries? Sells _cloud infrastructure_??
Amazon made two transitions:
1. Amazon the online bookseller => Amazon "The Everything Store"
2. Amazon the online retailer => Amazon the Cloud Services company
I believe what Stripe is doing here is closer to (1). "We are good at high-throughput APIs that wrap complexity with thin margins. We did it for credit cards, then ~all payment methods, now other digital bits."
In this context, tokens are much, much easier than international payments.
Now: Is it outlandish for their customers?
Not really. Every engineer knows stripe as an engineering company. I don't think Stripe is what it once was, but it's certainly a generational company. You're asking engineers—who broadly have a positive impression of Stripe—to use this product they already know. OpenRouter gets the positive brand association (trust) of Stripe; Stripe expands into a new domain whose technical needs are extremely similar.
Appreciate your thoughts.
re: the Amazon transitions, the first shareholder letter lays out the plan to go beyond books. As I remember it, books were always only supposed to be the entry point.
AWS transition was more around building the platform Amazon.com needed to grow, and also to monetize the same platform.
Neither of these really fit with Stripe.
Stripe can obviously operate OpenRouter, they have the tech skills. The risk to the core business is that OpenRouter's growth path will distract from the core financial business and/or require a very different capital stack. (Someone already suggested Stripe scale out first-party model running, which can get very expensive.)
Appreciate your taking the time to respond.
I don't think your analogy is a good one. Yes, in some way an LLM is a like a Db, but with a fundamental difference: the data is part of the database engine. So when you are the middleman like Stripe/OpenRouter in this case, you are in the middle of a stream of data, which has value on its own - since people pay for it - and some specific characteristics (cost, speed, "intelligence", latency etc) based on which a router can take decisions.
Try this aspect of the analogy:
Anthropic/OpenAI -> Oracle
Gemini -> SQL Server
DeepSeek -> MongoDB
Qwen -> PostgreSQL
Llama -> MySQL
(These are approximate, just as food for thought about broad segments of the markets.)
The important axis in this analogy is that there are likely to be a small number of pure plays that operate as public companies providing LLM services (Anthropic, OpenAI). There will be some companies that sell access to proprietary LLMs as adjacencies to their core product offerings (Gemini). Many/most people will use open offerings without license fees (Llama, Qwen, etc.), paying only for inference (which may be local).
The caveat here is that more pure LLM companies are likely to get public, but I doubt that will be a lasting phenomenon. (Sybase, Informix, Ingres, etc. were also standalone companies at one point, but the market would not support that many commercial database providers.)
Appreciate your taking the time to respond.
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