OpenRouter charges 5.5% to load credits. Stripe just bought it.
OpenRouter takes 5.5% when you load credits and zero markup on the tokens. Four outlets report four different prices for what Stripe paid to own it.
The Editors · 7 min read ·
Stripe agreed to buy OpenRouter on 19 August 2026 and announced it without a price. To see what changed hands, read OpenRouter's own fee page. The platform charges 5.5% with a $0.80 minimum to load credits with a card, 5% to load them with crypto, and zero markup on inference. Provider rates pass straight through. The money gets collected at the moment you put money in.
The asset is a percentage of deposits. Stripe already ran the rail that percentage was charged on, because OpenRouter's fee table names the card option after Stripe. The company that processed the payment now owns the fee charged on top of it.
Patrick Collison framed the deal around compute. "Tokens are the central currency for companies building with AI, and it's clear that the real-world economic potential will depend on making good use of scarce compute resources," he said in the release. That describes the product. The fee page describes the revenue.
What OpenRouter charges, line by line
Every figure below comes from OpenRouter's own documentation.
| Charge | Rate | When it hits |
|---|---|---|
| Credit purchase, card | 5.5%, $0.80 minimum | Every time you top up |
| Credit purchase, crypto | 5% | Every time you top up via Coinbase |
| Inference | no markup | Never. Provider list price passes through |
| Bring your own key | 5% | Above $25,000 a month of routed spend, or $200,000 on enterprise |
Read the table in order and the shape of the business shows up. The product is inference. The revenue is deposits.
That $0.80 floor gets described in secondary write-ups as punishing small top-ups by 10% to 20%. Do the division and it bites in a narrower band than that. The floor governs below $14.55, where 5.5% comes in under 80 cents. A $10 top-up costs $10.80, an effective 8%. At $20 and above you pay the flat 5.5% and the floor never applies again.
Compare that to where the rest of the AI stack takes its cut. Agent marketplaces charge between 3% and 25% on the work an agent does. OpenRouter charges less, and charges it earlier, on money that hasn't bought anything yet.
Four outlets, four prices, no filing
Stripe has not said what it paid. Here is what has been reported, and by whom.
| Reported price | Outlet | Date |
|---|---|---|
| About $10B (talks) | Wall Street Journal, via PYMNTS | 23 July 2026 |
| Over $7B | Bloomberg, via TechCrunch | 16 August 2026 |
| Over $8B, mostly stock | Axios, via TNW | 17 August 2026 |
| About $7.5B, $1.5B of it to founders | New York Times, via TNW | 19 August 2026 |
| Undisclosed | Stripe | 19 August 2026 |
A $2.5 billion spread between the high and low report, on a private deal between two private companies, means the price is unknown. Anyone quoting one of these as the price is quoting a source.
What is documented: OpenRouter closed a $113 million Series B led by Alphabet's CapitalG at a $1.3 billion post-money valuation on 26 May 2026. Eighty-five days later Stripe agreed to buy it. Against that $1.3 billion, the reported range works out to a step-up of 5.4x at $7 billion and 7.7x at $10 billion, in under twelve weeks.
The revenue figure is an estimate, and it matters which one you use
OpenRouter has published no revenue. The most-cited number is Sacra's estimate of $140 million annualized as of July 2026, up from roughly $50 million at the end of 2025. Treat it as a research firm's model, not a disclosure.
Run the reported prices against it and the multiple lands between 50 and 71 times annualized revenue. High for payments. Ordinary for AI infrastructure in 2026. Which frame you pick decides whether the deal looks expensive, and the fee page argues for the payments frame.
The estimate also implies a deposit figure. At a 5.5% take, $140 million of revenue would need about $2.5 billion of credits loaded across a year. That is a ceiling rather than a measurement: bring-your-own-key fees and enterprise contracts sit inside the same $140 million, so actual card deposits run lower.
Volume is the one place the numbers agree on direction. OpenRouter routed 100 trillion tokens a month in May 2026 across 8 million users and more than 400 models. By the week of the deal it was reported at more than 10 trillion tokens a day and over 10 million users, which is roughly triple in twelve weeks. Those come from separate reports rather than one series, and the model count wanders between 400 and 500 depending on the outlet, so read the trajectory and not the decimals.
What this costs you, if you run agents for money
Say you spend $1,000 a month on models. Routing it through OpenRouter by card costs $55 on top. Going direct to the provider costs zero on top, and you handle failover, model swaps and billing yourself.
So the question is whether neutral routing across 400 models is worth 5.5%. For a team switching models often, it usually is. For a single-model workload that never changes, it is a monthly donation. And the escape hatches are published in the same fee table: crypto credits at 5%, or bring-your-own-key free up to $25,000 a month of routed spend, which covers most operators outright.
That matters more as model prices fall. When OpenAI cut one model's price by 80%, the routing fee did not fall with it in absolute terms, it fell in proportion, because the fee is a percentage of what you deposit. Cheaper tokens shrink the toll and shrink the router's revenue per unit of work. That is the structural pressure sitting under a reported $7 billion price. Anyone pricing what an agent costs per resolution should carry the 5.5% as a line item rather than folding it into token spend, because it behaves differently.
What would break this read
Three things.
The price could be wrong. If Stripe paid $10 billion for $140 million of estimated revenue, the multiple stops looking like a payments deal at any framing, and the thesis that Stripe bought a take rate gets weaker than the thesis that it bought distribution to 10 million developers.
The fee structure could change. Stripe owns the pricing page now. A vertically integrated owner can drop the credit fee to zero and monetize the routing data, the enterprise contracts, or the float. If the 5.5% disappears within a year, it was distribution being bought and not a take rate.
The estimate could be badly off. Sacra is modeling a private company. If real revenue is double the estimate, every multiple in this piece halves.
What to watch
Whether the 5.5% survives the first year under Stripe. Whether the free bring-your-own-key allowance stays at $25,000 a month. And whether Stripe ever discloses the price, which it has no obligation to do and, on this evidence, no intention of doing.
Sources
- Stripe, "Stripe agrees to acquire OpenRouter", 19 August 2026
- OpenRouter documentation, fees and pricing FAQ, accessed 23 August 2026
- TechCrunch, "Stripe will reportedly acquire AI gateway startup OpenRouter for $7B+", 16 August 2026, reporting Bloomberg
- TNW, "Stripe seals its OpenRouter deal for a reported $7.5bn or more", 19 August 2026, reporting the New York Times and Axios
- PYMNTS, "Stripe eyes $10 billion deal for AI model marketplace OpenRouter", 23 July 2026, reporting the Wall Street Journal
- TechCrunch, "OpenRouter more than doubles valuation to $1.3B in a year", 26 May 2026
- Sacra, OpenRouter revenue and valuation, estimate as of July 2026
This is not financial advice.
