Refund policies are clearly documented in our terms. We actually DO offer refunds within 24hrs of credit purchase, which is significantly more flexible than most companies that operate in a similar way. And we try to use good judgement when there are extenuating circumstances.
By default (and in most cases) investors and operators are aligned. When we diligence our investors, we call companies they worked with where things didn’t go well, and speak to those founders. Understanding how investors operate when it’s not all up-and-to-the-right is important when picking partners!
Everyone wants a conspiracy, but what I originally posted is in fact the boring truth. Having a bunch of cash in the bank makes for a durable business!
We have two mechanisms whereby we retain data. Both are opt-in and off by default.
One mechanism where you get a discount and we can use the data (in theory this does mean sell it; but our intent is to use it to make efficient dynamic routing solutions. But absolutely we could one day sell it) and another where we retain it for you so you can see it in your logs. We have no rights to this data in any way. This is similar to how any tracing/logging solution works.
Both and opt-in. If you don’t opt in, we don’t retain anything and are a pass through with regards to your prompt data.
All of this is carefully documented and I encourage you to explore and chat with the docs.
Our general theory of the case is that, in the not so distant future, inference will be the second largest opex line item for most companies (behind headcount) and that sourcing, measuring, and governing those tokens is a massive horizontal opportunity.
We will inevitably expand into adjacencies because we like building things and experimenting and we have a lot of people with great taste who are likely to ship cool things that customers want to use!
Interesting. Will look into it! We are releasing pass through API params soon which might hit the bid, but is a bit different than what you are describing.
What differentiation are looking for? We have good documentation of every provider and what their data retention stance is, and you can figure allow/blocklists for all providers.
Check out the Guardrails section under settings and tell me what’s missing!
Hi HN! OpenRouter co-founder and COO here. Lots of questions about why we raised!
First off: We remain founder-led and founder-controlled, and intend on being here for a long time, creating awesome products for builders all over the world. We are basically a bunch of tinkerers who like building things, and try to make stuff that we would like, when building with AI.
Since this is about the raise though, happy to share perspective on it.
We believe that strong companies should have a strong balance sheets. We touch large volumes of spend, and have large spend commits across the ecosystem; having the cash to withstand what may come is a responsible buy-down of risk, and makes the company extremely durable.
It also tells our larger customers and provider partners that we will be able to continue to serve them (and pay our bills) for a long time to come. We don't need venture dollars to continue scaling (indeed the business is healthy) but you know when you don't want to raise $100m? When you really need it!
This is also good validation to employees (current and future) that the value we are creating together is real. We also take seriously our obligation to make a return for anyone who invests; we aren't valuationmaxxing and have the privilege of getting to pick who we work with. I don't think that gets a lot of airtime in the overall start-up world, but I think it's important!
Happy to answer questions and THANK YOU to everyone here who uses OpenRouter, and to everyone who has feedback for how we can improve!
Yeah we should do something to indicate cardinality. I can share that there can often (I'm talking generally; not related to this model in particular) be e.g. a very large app that can be pushing a lot of volume. But in almost all cases that app has a large number of end users. Hypothetically, for instance, would Cursor be consider one user, or millions?
Can you share more? I'm with OpenRouter and we would love to address this! We don't see this in our own testing, I don't believe -- but will share this feedback and dig in.
You are absolutely allowed to expose access to end users, as long as you continue to abide by terms of service. We have hundreds, if not thousands, of apps built on openrouter that in turn have end users of their own. We showcase many of them on our /apps ranking page!
COO of OpenRouter here. Thats right — we haven’t done it to date but we can’t have unlimited liabilities stacking up forever. At some point we will start expiring credits from accounts that have seen zero activity in over a year.
I watched the video at the expecting one thing and finding something completely different. Remarkable — [0] watch the video in its entirety. Not what I thought when I read “staples to repair porcelain”.
As per its own FAQ this plugin is out of date and doesn’t actually do anything incremental re:caching:
> "Hasn't Anthropic's new auto-caching feature solved this?"
> Largely, yes — Anthropic's automatic caching (passing "cache_control": {"type": "ephemeral"} at the top level) handles breakpoint placement automatically now. This plugin predates that feature and originally filled that gap.
At the risk of totally misunderstanding this...it seems to be exfiltration by the app developer, who already has access to all of these data sources and the data that the customer is inputting into the AI KYC app (in this example)...right? I don't believe this exposes any end-user information to a third party. The AI app developer is already 'trusted' and could get access to this information regardless of the exfiltration. Maybe someone can explain this to me more clearly.