Extremely relevant:

Ramp Router: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48987253

Maybe there were more than 1 bidder for OpenRouter… Regardless, a business like OpenRouter may be best in the form of a complement product of something else (like payment processing).

Wouldn’t it be cheaper to just spend $1B reimplementing it?

(Of course that is absurd, $10M would be plenty)

The value is in the existing customers, isn't it? Not so much the product.

What percentage of the potential market does openrouter have? Like even if they have 100% of today’s customers, they probably have like 3% of 5-years-from-now’s customers.

Seems like it’s also assuming in 5 years from now people will still want an AI router.

How many people even use more than one search engine?

A “search engine router” wouldn’t be very successful…

If AI tokens become unlimited like cell phone minutes, why bother routing?

quick you are a saas company pulling 3b cash annually how do you deploy it

> it has clear platform dynamics. It is an aggregator of AI models, and once enterprises use it, that creates switching costs since all your AI expense is in one place: logs, budgets, etc, so switching would be painful and generally not make a lot of sense.

Clearly what we need is a Router Router, to avoid router lock-in.

You jest but this is basically exactly what happened in crypto.

Do they have to

Interesting. I guess it fits since Openrouter's main value is in consolidating payment to all these different model providers

Does it mean openrouter can't sustain on its own? If so, bad news, new owner 'd surely want it to be profitable, so expect price hike.. :<

Do sustainable tech startups actually exist?

Please, no.