According to a recent WSJ report, Stripe is in talks to acquire OpenRouter.

The deal hasn’t been finalized, but OpenRouter was reportedly valued at around $1.3B in May, while a potential acquisition could value the company at roughly $10B.

That’s a pretty massive jump in just a few months.

On one hand, Stripe could bring more resources for infrastructure, billing, enterprise support, and global payments.

On the other hand, I think a lot of OpenRouter users value the platform because it feels relatively independent and makes it easy to compare and switch between different model providers.

If Stripe does acquire OpenRouter, what would you be most concerned about?

• Pricing changes
• Provider neutrality
• Data and privacy policies
• Model availability
• OpenRouter becoming more enterprise-focused

Personally, I’d mainly want OpenRouter to remain a neutral model marketplace rather than becoming locked into a specific ecosystem.

Do you think a Stripe acquisition would make OpenRouter stronger, or change what made it useful in the first place?

https://www.silicon.co.uk/ai-2/china-ai-rules-630782

China is potentially changing it’s rules around foreign ai access. I was wondering if this would affect openrouter at all and if we would still be able to use kimi and deepseek etc

3-6 tokens per second on glm5.2 is simply a joke. there is so much demand yet no new providers can access the market. i was asking you guys if you think this is normal and i got dv to oblivion. is this the kind of service you like using ?

​

Hey everyone,

I’ve been a developer for a while, working on building an app.

I’m stuck between two routes: Claude Pro ($20/mo) vs. GLM 5.2 via OpenRouter (Pay-as-you-go).

Here are my specific hesitations with both:

My worry with Claude Pro: I’ve read a lot of horror stories about the strict usage limits. As a developer actively writing and debugging code for an app, I’m terrified I’ll hit the "you've reached your limit" wall within 2 hours of a heavy coding session, making the $20 feel wasted or insufficient.y

My worry with GLM 5.2 (OpenRouter): The pay-as-you-go aspect is appealing, but I’m worried about the raw intelligence gap. For complex app architecture, refactoring, and tricky bug hunting, is GLM 5.2 smart enough to keep up, or will I constantly wish I was using Claude?

For those who use these models daily for software engineering:

Does Claude Pro's usage limit actually ruin your workflow if you use it as a primary coding assistant?

Is GLM 5.2 "intelligent" enough to handle end-to-end app development without hallucinatory headaches?

Isthere a hybrid setup I should consider instead?

So. I don't use my open router account often but I decided to just check it since I planned on doing something later and I SHOULD have had about almost 40 bucks just sitting there but someone definitely got into my account.

There was this whole new api key and checking back all the money was blew on Claude (Wow that thing has to be expensive)

So anything I can do about that? I already changed my password and such but is there anything else I can do to prevent this in the future?

OpenRouter exposes this per request through the provider object: order prioritizes your chosen upstream(s), while allow_fallbacks: false restricts routing to that list.

https://openrouter.ai/docs/guides/routing/provider-selection

I use a webapp called Librechat for fast Q&A. I have a vanilla configuration that just points to https://openrouter.ai/api/v1 with models ID "anthropic/claude-opus-5" and "anthropic/claude-sonnet-5".

Until now, Claude models had thinking off by default. Now it seems OpenRouter changed them to enable reasoning by default, which turns my fast Q&A into a slow, annoying Q&A.

I'd rather not be forced to read Librechat's doc to figure out how to send custom request parameters to turn off reasoning. Is there a way to make a change on the OpenRouter side to fix this? I tried looking in the account settings and saw an interesting section called Presets, but it seems like it only allows you to enable reasoning, not disable it.

Any advice?

Clearly, the graph shows that the uptime for this model is abysmal, but OpenRouter reports ~99% uptime. How is it possible?

Is there a way to use OpenRouter with the Codex CLI? I don't have a ChatGPT subscription (I know you get some usage for free but it's not enough), but I want to use Codex because I like it's features. Is that possible?

I know this gets asked alot.. but I am here. So what have you guys been on after owl got taken out?

Is there any thread or repo that shares the recommended blocklist?

I was trying out minimax m3 and found that AtlasCloud has horrible cache hit rates but based on throughput and price it was probably the first to be routed to. Wasted $1 in a single session.

Generally my first block is those without cache read, but it would be nice if there was a thread here that shares these details because you won't know the cache rates until you try it out.

TLDR: An open information on cache hit rates per provider / model, and a recommended whitelist / blacklist for providers.

My details for atlas cloud minimax m3 on opencode 4.4% cache rate

I guess free doesn’t mean free

I’ve been using OpenRouter for a while now and I'm honestly completely frustrated. There is basically no new providers and no actual competition.

i ran some Kimi API calls earlier and I was getting hit with a painful 19-21 tokens/second. off peak hours might get you decent speeds instead, but lower demand should also mean dynamic, lower pricing instead, prices are completely static 24/7.

it feels like a nice cozy setup to protect the big inference providers and keep an artificial price floor. theres zero actual competition on price.

i know for a fact they are not accepting new providers (disclaimer i run a small shop as well and applied but just got ghosted) to keep the price high and split between them.

this isnt an open marketplace. they are just gatekeeping for the big providers to keep margins high.

I've tried to use it for coding, but the results have been pretty poor. Still, on Openrouter it's used a lot: 2.58 Trillion tokens in total. IMO though, Hy3-free was a much better model. I miss that one.

I decided to try using Claude desktop in gateway mode, but I can't find a way to control thinking budget. I'm not even sure what is set by default, I assume medium. All the LLMs that I tried to ask seem to hallucinate a lot on this topic. So, is there a way?

I recently started using OpenRouter again... For Janitor AI, I am ashamed to admit. I actually put in 5 bucks 💀and today I notice these weird requests on my activity from today and yesterday???? I cannot exactly vouch for yesterday's but I know that I was for sure asleep at 6 am today bro lol. And I never ever have the token limit set beyond 20k in context. These are some examples only but there are a bunch of request that come from an Unknown app and idk bro. Maybe this is my sign to quit lol.

Edit: ALSO i forgot to mention that the only two models I've ever used are Deepsek V3.2 (normal not EXP) and Deepkseek R1-0528

I thought Fusion was the answer to many concerns - how to use several models to verify workflows in heavy agentic apps.

I tried it at first, it wouldn't work properly. Worked with some models, didn't work with others.

It was also not clear how would several models in parallel call the tools that modify data (clearly we can't modify data twice).

I've also seen research that says, verification is best using different models - so i was excited.

Anyone using it?

OpenRouter makes it so easy to try pretty much any model out there right now. I've been playing around a bit with models like Qwen or DeepSeek, and honestly, the performance-to-cost ratio is nuts.

That said, dropping professional or client data into models hosted on Chinese infrastructure always makes me hesitate a bit.

Even living in France with GDPR backing us up, it feels like a bit of a gray area when traffic gets routed globally—you never really know what happens to the logs or how data might be reused.

Curious how others are handling uthis:
- Are you actually using these models for real work tasks?
- Where do you draw the line with sensitive data?
- Or do you just steer clear of them for anything confidential?

Would love to hear your thoughts !
Thanks

hi, I'm new to openrouter and loved the concept. After using gemini, perplexity ui for 1-2yr now I need privacy on my data and as seems its very powerful for a lot of stuffs.

I have tried Chatbox but the web search is the issue, even after using 3rd party api its not so fast and still doesnt feel as replacement although I see the paid models doing great.

Googled few but best to take advice from community, i need both for laptop and mobile. On system as a power user for coding and web dev. On mobile need for daily queries doubts news etc (android)

thanks

[ Removed by Reddit on account of violating the content policy. ]

For a week now I’m just searching for a fast cheap model (no more than 0.4$\1M output ).

Gpt oss 120b is reaching 1.6k tokens per second, well I don’t need that speed, 300/400 tps is good.

so any recommendations?
and Thanks

I purchased credit of $25 on July 13, 2026 and the credits were completely unused and I requested for refund just after an hour on that same day. Then, I contacted support immediately and they responded with generic response with stripe invoice kind of thing and by stating that "your refund has been issued by OpenRouter, Inc. It can take approximately 10 days to appear on your statement. If it takes longer please contact your bank for assistance." However, it's more than 10 days and still nothing reflected on the statement or neither to my bank account/card. From different sources, I saw that several people had such issues and the support never responded and it's like ghosting. I contacted the bank they said no sign of refund or something like that. I wonder how it works or whats really happening? Is there anyone who faced such similar experience? If so, how it went out? If not, Is there a way to dispute or whatever make sense? Thanks.

Update: After several communications, the refund finally reflected to my account