GoKawiilOpenRouter · 8/19/2026
Today, we are excited to announce that we are joining forces with Stripe, to power the next wave of GDP growth globally.
OpenRouter is the first and largest model marketplace and gateway. We are the best way to discover and use any AI model, with one interface, broad provider choice, model-agnostic observability, cost management, and routing that improves price, performance, and uptime. We now process 10+ trillion tokens per day from 400+ AI models for a community of over 10 million developers and companies. Since our founding, we have seen at least 10x growth in inference volume every year.
We want to explain why we made the decision to join forces with Stripe and what it means for the millions of developers and companies that build on us.
What this means for our users
OpenRouter will continue to operate as it is: same mission, same name, same product, same roadmap. If you build on OpenRouter today, nothing about your integration changes.
OpenRouter exists to give users every model on equal footing, provide open signals about how they’re used in the market, help developers orchestrate them together, and make them observable and manageable at scale. That commitment is core to how we operate, and it doesn’t bend to any model, any provider, or any parent company. It also extends to a growing ecosystem of inference-adjacent services, including AI-native web search, context management, and more to come.
Routing decisions will remain driven by one thing: what’s best for you, the user.
Our mission
We started OpenRouter in early 2023 on a simple belief: intelligence will be multi-model. No single model will win every task, and the frontier will move rapidly. That freedom is critical infrastructure for the industry. AI is too important for its future to be decided by whichever single model gets embedded first. AI has become the single largest driver of economic growth in the US, and inference is quickly becoming the largest line item for every company.
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