>> monetization challenges of every AI company
Except OpenRouter sees all your prompts, sends your requests to different providers with pinky promises that they dont use your data, and is therefore a non starter for any company who cares about compliance.
If Stripe wants to spend 7 billion on a glorified reverse-proxy-api-gateway go ahead. I can here and now, guarantee to be able to reproduce all their functionality in 3 months, and for less than 10 million dollars. And Stripe internal engineering teams should be able to do better, as I will do it in the evenings only :-))
Classic HN dev: it's just an API proxy! I can reproduce it myself for cheaper!
Ignoring that you can't reproduce the widespread adoption and mindshare OpenRouter has already built.
That's what Stripe is spending $7 billion on.
You definitely can build an LLM router with only the features you need (even the ones absent in OR!) for cheaper. Openrouter is 5% markup on all token usage. If you're a serious pay-per-use customer of AI, that's a lot of money.
Mindshare ? Nowadays people switch models like shirts, and providers faster. Its not Oracle or Microsoft...Those 7 billion are just a dropdown menu...
What is the prohibiting factor to getting these?
What mindshare? It literally is an API gateway with a rather minuscule usage that anyone can drop at any moment to use any other proxy or when providers forbid the use if their services via proxies (like it happened with Anthropic already).
How the hell can it anywhete close to $7 billion?
When Facebook bought Instagram for $1 billion, it had 30 million users with hardly anyone else competing in the space.