I am happy for the team's success but I am sad and anxious for what may become of the DuckDB. It is my favorite tool. Like other comments mentioned, DuckDB is open source and MIT license so I hope it will survive and evolve further the way it did.
duckpgq is great. I'd say the tl;dr is duckpgq if you have tables you want to traverse like a graph sometimes, latticedb when graph traversal is the primary mechanism of querying.
One of the motivating use cases for me was experimenting with agentic memory. I use latticedb as the backing data store. Finding related memories is traversing the graph (kind of like graph RAG).
It is amazing how we watch from the sidelines these aquisitions and think .... why such big bill ? But it takes a good team to sell and everytime someone is successful it is because probably they have great sellers who believe in their value and demand a price. It is certainly not an easy task to get to the finish line for a startup and pay back their investors.
Counterpoint: you can't just go to Visa/Mastercard or a merchant acquirer out there and set up an account on the same terms that Stripe can.
On the other hand, you can sign up to any LLM provider and get API access on terms that are the same or better (since I'm sure they don't appreciate having a middleman and would benefit from incentivizing direct usage) than OpenRouter gets.
To add to this; payment infrastructure requires a lot of heavy lifting. There's a lot of regulations you need to adhere to, different payment systems in different countries, settlement, chargebacks, etc.
There is a reason why not doing your own payment processing is a thing.
OpenRouter may have some interesting things in streamlining the process of switching LLM providers, but it is indeed something easy to replicate in comparison to payment processing.
Yes, you can get better pricing if you do it yourself. But the true advantage of OpenRouter is that, in a space where there's a new model being released every week, you can easily switch to whatever model is best at any given time without having to set up accounts with multiple providers. Or you can just experiment with the latest release. Their product is the convenience. Of course if you decide to only use a specific provider or two, then you don't need OpenRouter.
But it's not really that difficult to make a clone of OpenRouter's service. What they do isn't really that original.
Their only value comes from the fact that the currently have lots of traffic. And I dkn't think that their cumstomers are really bound to theur servuce. They could switch to a competitor without too much hassle.
Yes, but as l9ng as there's no clone, they're good. On the potential clone side, I guess many will be put off by the fact that "there's already OpenRouter". Also, a clone would need to find a way to make existing OpenRouter customers to switch, which isn't easy.
Openrouter is fragile, one good competitor and they are at risk.
Or if one of the provider suddenly decide to forbid openrouter from using their api. Why would they do that tho ?? Well it's not like execs never take dumb decisions.
In my humble opinion, it's extremely overpriced. But then, it's just the standard with AI currently. Divide every ai company valuation by 1000 and you might get it's real value.
Now that's the value. OpenRouter has the power to step on the air hose of any provider they don't like.
That's Google's real power. Works for them. Between search, ads, and the "app store", they can crush most companies. OpenRouter's power is only in one area. For now.
Stripe operates in a very regulated industry where new entrance is difficult
OpenRouter is commodity stuff, I've never used it personally and picked alternatives. The sense I got from people who said they used it was that they are on average penny pinchers. That does not seem like an ideal user base
Having worked on web apps that processed online payments before and after Stripe I totally agree, this was an area of real pain that became suddenly extremely simple because of Stripe. The alternatives were terrible–100 page Word docs of SOAP API docs for Authorize.net, massive PCI compliance requirement specifications, horrible legacy merchant services businesses.
On the other hand, I operate an app that talks to (and logs prompts/meters costs) to many different LLM API providers, and I do not consider it painful at all. I have an AI agent to deal with any integration quirks, if needed. Mostly they provide OpenAI-compatible APIs anyhow. It's basically a no-brainer to go direct with the providers and save 5%, the great majority of the cost of an AI-powered app is no longer dev time implementing the integration, it's the tokens themselves.
OpenRouter is already the entrenched go-to router tbh. There's competitors (Vercel) but they're already well known. Stripe can also make them more competitive because they can waive / profit off the transaction cost. Considering stripe takes like a 3% fee, and the openrouter markup is 5%, that's a pretty big boost.
Now is that enough revenue to earn back 7B.... I'm not too sure. I guess they're betting realy big that these sorts of model routers will gain explosive token usage in the future
I don't get the 'transaction fee reduction' arguments. Yeah they can reduce the fee, which in turn reduces profit margin... any other product/service in a similar position can do the same... it's not some sort of free win
OpenRouter’s “moat” is currently “why would I use anything else?”.
Stripe has presumably only purchased them because they think there’s consumer-surplus to monetize here, which presumably will soon be giving me lots of reasons to use something else.
It isn't clear to me what advantages OpenRouter has over running a similar router-aggregator locally for ~free. I guess they have stronger bargaining power than a solo engineer or small startup, and can therefore negotiate volume discounts with model providers. The question is if those discounts let them offer cheaper rates than a local router-aggregator even after the markup. And if they can do that, then OpenRouter is undercutting the providers themselves on price, which I would imagine the providers would not want to see.
I presume they are sitting on a lot of usage data and will be able to roll out efficient auto-routing based on it. There is a huge demand for this as most users are overwhelmed by provider options and just want to route to the best/cheapest model based on the task.
I think it's kind of like what GitHub has despite getting rid of the quota system for Copilot: existing customers that are already setup to deal with them.
In this case I imagine that OpenRouter's moat is going to be that businesses that already use Stripe will have a lower bar to choosing OpenRouter to provide the AI access, and clean integration with Stripe to pay for stuff like AI support bots.
The flexibility is kind of what I'm pointing to, if I understand you right. Instead of dealing with Anthropic, OpenAI, XAi etc directly and having systems to handle user assignment, budgeting etc for each, companies just deal with GitHub, which they've probably been dealing with anyway.
As with Cursor it's the data - all the prompts and responses that can be used to train AI models. Getting a head start on that at the pace of current development costs.
They have enough customers to have leverage against providers. As an example, if they decide they can be "punished" if they claim ZDR but lie about it.
They are the leading LLM API routing tool. Stripe is the leading payments API. They are betting on OpenRouter being as important to developers as payments. Both let them take a small percentage of a shitload of transactions. Being the goto service for APIs and executing well is the moat. Someone else would have to beat the volume leader on price or beat them on execution. Good luck. The only realistic competitors would be Amazon, Google or Microsoft and none have shown any interest so far.
I don't understand why one would let a router handle their LLM request (other than for routing it to the cheapest inference provider for open models).
When I build an application that uses LLMs, it's tuned and tested for a specific model only. LLMs are not really drop-in replacements of each other, even different versions of the same series.
The pertinent question isn't why OpenRouter but why a router company is worth 7B.
You can use one key for multiple models, you can have many keys with a budget on each, you can manage all your keys in one piece of glass, you don't have to deal with the upstream vendors directly just to name a few. These are all things that may be important to developers. I can't even get an OpenAI API key because those morons can't get their phone verification to work properly. OpenRouter is the only way I can use their models.
If you meant that generally: because productivity is increasing; the world is getting richer. Not all of it flows down, but some does; top SV salaries are up too. By a lot.
edit: Inflation does not account for the observed growth.
We are certainly seeing higher monetary velocity in certain sectors. That usually follows from real economic expansion but could also be due in part to inflation.
Corollary to this is that whenever companies acquire smaller companies and lay off the small company's sales teams, they deserve what they get. Looking at you, big company that turned my last one from nearly a billion valuation into a $20M fire sale in 3-4 years.
I <3 DuckDB. It has become one of my go to tools for storing, data processing , integrations and now even graph. More importantly it's fun to use because it is so portable. Looking forward to v2.
Not OP, but for me, the lack of essentially any type system in SQLite makes it a total no-go for storing data long-term or that more than one application needs to access. Date/time being an especially painful footgun in SQLite.
I view SQLite as something a single application can use for storing state/settings/misc operational data instead of directly writing files, especially if the data being stored is relational or needs ACID. As soon as the data itself has meaning and structure per se, you're better off with something that can help enforce and describe the data: rich datatypes, foreign keys that aren't optional, etc.
DuckDB is heavily focused on analytical workflows, so it stores data in a compressed columnar format. So "rewrite one row" is more efficient in SQLite, but "sum all the values in this column" is vastly more efficient in DuckDB.
That's the core of the difference, to me. But the projects also have a pretty different ethos. SQLite has always prioritized simplicity, often at the expense of features, whereas DuckDB's approach to features seems to be "the more the merrier." E.g. the star feature of this new release, client/server mode. Plenty of people would love to see something similar in SQLite, but it doesn't seem likely.
Thank you! The news is an RSS reader/aggregator, so picking select sources to pull from. I opted not to use anything else as this works quite well and we don't need more news than we have. Plus we have Brave for web search. The sources are like the BBC, the guardian, techcrunch, hackernews, etc.
