If you take a closer look at OpenRouter, it is a Cloudflare + Stripe wrapper.
Payments are core to their business. They only charge 5%, of which probably 3-3.5% goes directly to stripe. So they are making maybe 1%. If they have any payments fraud it takes a crazy amount of volume to make up for it.
So, the openrouter aquisition makes a lot of sense to me. I suspect almost all of openrouter growing pains are payments related.
If you take a closer look at OpenRouter, it is a Cloudflare + Stripe wrapper.
Payments are core to their business. They only charge 5%, of which probably 3-3.5% goes directly to stripe. So they are making maybe 1%. If they have any payments fraud it takes a crazy amount of volume to make up for it.
So, the openrouter aquisition makes a lot of sense to me. I suspect almost all of openrouter growing pains are payments related.
That is a unique angle I did not think about - I did try to explain why I think it is an aggregator nonetheless.
https://open.substack.com/pub/taikhooms/p/why-openrouter-can...