Just guessing. The frenzy around popular, good already, and successful services with the corporate crap flowing from this acquisition announcement too is appalling. The "what's best for you, the user" heavy emphasis when this would be inherently evident in any honest service forecasts the opposite.

Some highlights from one of my agents asked for a no bullshit evaluation:

"By buying OpenRouter, they own the routing layer that decides which model gets called and at what price."

"Stripe wants to be the economic infrastructure for AI — meaning they want to be the toll booth and the traffic cop for the entire AI economy."

"... insider market intelligence that OpenAI, Anthropic, and Google don't fully have. Stripe would now have it."

"The $7B+ price is absurd on any financial metric, but this isn't a financial acquisition — it's a strategic positioning play to own the platform layer of the next computing paradigm."

"140x revenue multiple: At ~$50M revenue, this is not a financial valuation. It's a strategic land grab — buying the chokepoint before someone else does."

I do not feel a particularly strong smell of 'best for the user' here for some reason... More like the usual 'how do we squeeze out more for our PE folks from this' kind of scent.

Ok, ok, need to have a tickmark next to the 'support' item in the quarterlies, let it be an eternal spinning wheel presenting on clicking the 'Our award winning instant support is HERE!' button then. Its close to the real experience anyway, right?

Recently I started to get hold of the daily events with Kagi News, world, science, local news, AI, Cybersecurity, ... That gives a very good platform to have a broad overview quickly and as a jumping board into details of specific events making me interested. Usually it is better for (configurable to my needs) quick overview than any big news portals out there.

However succeeding is increasingly harder and harder.

You can be the best communicator in the world but when the world only want to push their story to manipulate you towards their will then the only skill that counts is obedience or being the most aggressive manipulator. I wish that meaningful communication was a key to good and content life.

You still can have your bubbles in the universe though, there it is invaluable, of course. Isolationism on the personal level might be necessary, unfortunately.

Like if it was something of a sport with olympics where people compete in their own weight and it is measured in the end to the hundredths of seconds in front of spectators in a stadion shaped library cheering READ, READ, READ! Quality is mentioned, remotely, through selection, but still, the mental picture remains the same. The post smells like a training guide from a large gym franchise for readers. It's name is 'Serious Readers!'

You know, there are millions of ways having fun that endangers no others. Millions!

(also small children have no fun, not at all! Woken up to be scared to shit, for f's sake, that's opposite of fun, the very opposite! Use your brain please!)

Speculative thought only, of course.

That money they want back!

From somewhere, any way, pimping the EBITDA and ARR numbers to the expected one for the 5-7 years resale cycle or such. ARR needs subscription, and if you have user lock in - well, otherwise you wouldn't buy some trivial service like this wouldn't you? You counted on the lock-in, that is central to you 'business model', or more like exploitation - then try cash it. Now! You can alienate people down the line? Let that be the problem of the next owner of the product, you will cash out soon anyway. And next PE look at the price/ARR ratio mostly, anyway, it will be a fine add-on to some other PE target at least, if the ARR ratio is fine.

PE is shitting where it eats.... and others eat too ... ruining it for everyone. Don't care. Why don't they buy oil or beef farms or whatever, why they need to ruin the internet too?

So feel free to use AI to pimp your resume, they will use AI to process it.