As Visa/MasterCard stock price is partly a reflection of the economy at large, I suspect Stripe wants their company valuation to be a reflection of the AI economy.
Not sure how I feel about this. I'm a fan of OpenRouter; it's a super convenient way to work with a bunch of different model providers. Good usage tracking etc. as well.
If Stripe acquires them, I worry that they'll slowly destroy the service, like they did with LemonSqueezy 2 years ago.
I think this is the first real step from Stripe into token economics. They tried with a usage-based product, but from talking to stripe engineers, it sounds like there was less appetite than they thought. Could have been for many reasons, but I wonder if owning the actual request layer is a kind of missing ingredient?
If so many applications are just going to be token resellers (which, to be honest, a lot of very successful companies today are), one of the biggest issues is: if I'm charging my users $10 a month for unlimited AI usage, what does that really mean and look like? Do the other users subsidise the super users' use?
Big companies can stomach this uncertainty if they've raised a tonne of capital, but if you're a little solo-preneur or small startup/business (which Stripe historically favour), you have to know exactly how much this is going to cost you. Else, if you're off by a few zeros, this will bankrupt your company.
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[ 3.6 ms ] story [ 33.5 ms ] threadJust a tangential thought from our times.
If Stripe acquires them, I worry that they'll slowly destroy the service, like they did with LemonSqueezy 2 years ago.
If so many applications are just going to be token resellers (which, to be honest, a lot of very successful companies today are), one of the biggest issues is: if I'm charging my users $10 a month for unlimited AI usage, what does that really mean and look like? Do the other users subsidise the super users' use?
Big companies can stomach this uncertainty if they've raised a tonne of capital, but if you're a little solo-preneur or small startup/business (which Stripe historically favour), you have to know exactly how much this is going to cost you. Else, if you're off by a few zeros, this will bankrupt your company.