Stratechery (free feed)Article
Stripe Acquiring OpenRouter, Aggregating AI?, Flipping the Business Model
Stripe sees a future where payments and model routing converge. OpenRouter's real value isn't that it exists, it's that it sits between dozens of models and end users. Stripe buying it means the company thinks model commoditization is real and the money is in transaction volume and switching costs. For builders: expect better instrumentation and billing for multi-model systems. For investors: aggregation layers at any level of the stack are suddenly more defensible.