What Stripe Sees in OpenRouter That Most Miss

On August 19, Stripe announced it "has agreed to acquire OpenRouter" (stripe.com). The press reported a price of more than $7 billion. Patrick Collison said "Stripe is building the economic infrastructure for AI".

But honestly, I didn't get it. What does a payments company want with an AI model router?

Six weeks later, a new model answered that for me.

On October 1, Cloudflare announced Clef, two open-source "decision models" that it calls "fully Jev-API compatible" (blog.cloudflare.com). Jev, from TypeSafe, is the decision model I use in one of my apps. So I wanted to race them against each other right away.

But I didn't want to open yet another account for that. Another sign-up, another email confirmation, another credit card, another invoice at the end of the month. Count the AI subscriptions you pay for today. It's insane.

So I checked OpenRouter first.