Counterpoint: you can't just go to Visa/Mastercard or a merchant acquirer out there and set up an account on the same terms that Stripe can.
On the other hand, you can sign up to any LLM provider and get API access on terms that are the same or better (since I'm sure they don't appreciate having a middleman and would benefit from incentivizing direct usage) than OpenRouter gets.
Counterpoint: you can't just go to Visa/Mastercard or a merchant acquirer out there and set up an account on the same terms that Stripe can.
On the other hand, you can sign up to any LLM provider and get API access on terms that are the same or better (since I'm sure they don't appreciate having a middleman and would benefit from incentivizing direct usage) than OpenRouter gets.