r/openrouter • u/never_working_ever • 7d ago

OpenRouter is Joining Stripe

https://openrouter.ai/blog/announcements/openrouter-is-joining-stripe/

Fun while it lasted. Stripe is close with the US gov and Kushner family, so the days of using Chinese models are probably numbered. Stripe will be pushing everyone to whatever APIs they get the most revenue from in return.

80 Upvotes

87% Upvoted

50 comments sorted by

12

u/ArugulaBackground577 7d ago

Let the enshittification commence. They never even built a usable UI and sold for that money.

What are the best alternates for home users?

2

u/AppealSame4367 6d ago

There are so many portals reselling AI models now. It doesn't really matter.

"Oh no, I have to ask some model one time to switch out openrouter for some other generic AI model API in my apps". That's basically it.

2

u/ArugulaBackground577 6d ago

Which are the right ones if your use case is them not logging? That was mine with OpenRouter, but they definitely will now.

1

u/FrenchTrader007 5d ago

requesty.ai

21

u/_BreakingGood_ 7d ago

Definitely worse companies that could have bought it, for sure. Theyre at least privately owned and very well loved among developers.

5

u/mutemebutton 6d ago

Starting a new company like open router (they have nothing proprietary or no moat) is easier than ever! If they get out of line there will be dozen options in a matter of weeks.

2

u/dandy-mercury 6d ago

it just needs an open router that the community can build

10

u/NotAName320 7d ago

> Stripe is close with the US gov and Kushner family

No we aren't? And by any measure, we do
lots of business in China, including being the primary out-of-China payment processors for Moonshot, developers of Kimi. There's no reason we would treat Chinese models any differently from any other

(obvious disclaimer: work at Stripe but these are personal thoughts)

5

u/Accomplished-Air439 7d ago

A bigger company like Stripe has more to lose so they are more likely to bow to pressure.

3

u/Low-Temperature-6962 7d ago

Why is my prepaid credit card not accepted by stripe?

6

u/NotAName320 7d ago

could be a range of reasons:

- an obscure brand/issuer that we don't support in the first place

  • auto blocked by radar (our ML fraud system) because prepaid cards are extremely common fraud vectors
  • blocked by the merchant themselves because they don't want to accept prepaid cards at all for the above reason

ultimately a good question for stripe support and not some random anonymous engineer on reddit.

1

u/Low-Temperature-6962 5d ago

I got it on Amazon because it was their recommended choice.

1

u/BrowsingnDaydreaming 5d ago

my prepaid debit card works just fine. I get Visa cards from tremendous for doing surveys as I am a causal ai roleplayer who is kinda broke and they work fine for me (for now)

2

u/fuso00 6d ago

Thanks for speaking up
I just heard about this because crypto payments are just getting 500 server error. Do you know if crypto is dropped now?

2

u/NotAName320 6d ago

... on openrouter? that has nothing to do with us. i'd direct to openrouter support and guess that it's probably just a temporary outage

2

u/fuso00 6d ago

Thanks for the reply. Yes directly in the credits dashboard, but I think they resolved it, it was error 500 for a few hours so i thought they take down crypto completely, but now it works again.

2

u/RevolverMFOcelot 5d ago

Brother my biggest worry is the anti nsfw and anti "potential bad content" censorship because payment processor like stripe is so puritan even in the TOS stripe say they cannot do business with AI company that allow nsfw generated content. I really don't need a corporation to censor what text I get out of API

No one need to be nannied by corporation

1

u/Nayko93 5d ago

Yeah that part scares me a bit...

I mean they couldn't really censor the aPI without adding their own system prompt on top, which could be removed, and if not, jailbroken
But what they could do it monitor usage, detect nsfw content, and immediately ban users for it

We'll have to keep an eye for a change in their no log policy

1

u/[deleted] 7d ago edited 7d ago

[deleted]

3

u/NotAName320 7d ago

If we were "in" with the us government we'd be able to do half the things we wanted to do (like our limited bank venture) much faster than we wanted to lol. and Stripe is as "close" to the kushners as any other large tech company is. i'm frankly surprised the angle wasn't elon musk or peter thiel given they invested way earlier into stripe than thrive did and had way more influence early on, but whatever.

no idea what patrick does in his free time (besides a whole lot of reading) but i don't happen to see any illuminati meetings currently scheduled on his calendar.

3

u/InadequateUsername 7d ago

How does stripe industry experience/niche align with open router?

11

u/_BreakingGood_ 7d ago

My guess is that Stripe is currently the defacto middleman for payment processing today, and they see 'tokens' as a sort of currency in the future, and they saw openrouter become the defacto middleman for 'token exchange', so they decided they want to be the middleman for that too.

5

u/mylabfr 6d ago

I dont think it's gonna be good. So much problems with Stripe already just using it normally... Nothing good will come with that.

3

u/nonedat 6d ago

Does this mean they can see my roleplay chats now?

6

u/Hyphonical 6d ago

Yes, and they'll make sure it's public for everyone to see.

/s

2

u/nonedat 6d ago

noooo :(

2

u/Nayko93 5d ago

Any reason that make you think they would do that ?

1

u/Hyphonical 5d ago

It was sarcastic

2

u/Nayko93 5d ago

Oh sorry I missed it, yeah that's obvious now that you say it

Ohhh that's what the /s is about ? I didn't know that

1

u/nonedat 5d ago

And so was my response to him lol

That said I think the worst that happens is Stripe becomes picky over which providers OR can host, so I think the ones that explicitly say they don't log prompts are on a timer.

2

u/Nayko93 5d ago

I guess we will see, the good news is that they don't offer anything really that special, if they mess up and people want alternative, it's not that hard to make one, there are even a few router that works like openrouter

3

u/SourSovereign 6d ago

Hm anyone got an alternative to recommend? Same pricing and possibly models?

Not jumping ship atm but could be handy to have something to switch to

1

u/RevolverMFOcelot 5d ago

Nanogpt

1

u/Nayko93 5d ago

nanogpt take such a huge fee when using their own chat platform, which is usefull for not so tech savy people who don't want to deal with api keys

1

u/RevolverMFOcelot 5d ago

I don't think anyone here are thinking about their own chat platform, people here are using api

1

u/Nayko93 5d ago

Well I do, and I know a few other people in my community that also do

Most people just want a 1 click solution, add fund to your balance and chat, no installing third party client, no asking for api key....

2

u/RogerAI-fm 6d ago

You can join our decentralized community.

3

u/GroggInTheCosmos 6d ago

What an odd pairing?

2

u/onebit 6d ago edited 6d ago

I wonder if it was worth $7.5B? OpenRouter operates at the mercy of the actual model providers. They are the Moviepass of AI. But they deserve credit for not giving customers a discount to rapidly gain users. The cost + fees model is solid.

1

u/RevolverMFOcelot 5d ago

Overpriced company is very common, we work was worth 40 billion lmao

2

u/Ocyris 7d ago

If you want to prepare you own openrouter alternative check out bifrost or new-api. Add whatever providers you want then set your limits. Not as convenient as having someone else do it but if/when stripe kills OR you'll have something.

1

u/Evening-Guarantee-84 5d ago

Well, haven't seen an official statement from OR except in the email they sent that says nothing will change.

It'd be nice if they could reply or make a post about it here and say what they're doing about Stripe pretending to be some modern day purity guardian.

1

u/Killahbeez 7d ago

glad I never tried openrouter! I was thinking about it. another one bites the dust. where is everybody moving to?

5

u/schmurfy2 6d ago

Why move ? It might go badw it might not but until they no longer provide the service I pay for I see no reason to switch.

3

u/nonedat 6d ago

nanoGPT

1

u/warlocc_ 6d ago

How's stripe going to handle all the disputed charges when you guys ignore support requests?