A lot of the freakout and "bye" posts on the OpenCodeCLI subreddit due to DeepSeek raising prices.
Stripe is a middleman. So is OpenRouter. So is OpenCode. Unless you own the data center and the hardware, how cheap can a middleman's tokens really be compared to the hyperscalers, without massive model compression?
Even DeepSeek itself is raising token prices. How much margin is there for a middleman like Stripe buying tokens in bulk from a data center and reselling them? Last i check Stripe do not run or own physical data center
I doubt Stripe can do much better here.
That's old economy thinking. If you have shit tons of data about the behavior of large groups of people, someone will pay you for it. HFT firms paying for satellite pictures of shopping mall parking lots in order to get an advantage over their competitors is old news, but it gives you an idea of the game being played. Why do you think meta bought gif keyboard?