❯ OpenAI Slashes Prices on OpenRouter to Win Developers, Luna Usage Surpasses Opus 5 and Sonnet 5 Combined

PRICE WARAccording to The Information, OpenAI is using deep discounts on the model aggregation platform OpenRouter to win developer budgets, and usage of its Luna model has already surpassed the combined usage of Claude Opus 5 and Sonnet 5. The discounting is substantial — at public list prices, Luna undercuts Anthropic’s cheapest model, Claude Haiku 4.5, by roughly 5x on input tokens and 4x on output tokens.

NEW OWNERThis battlefield just changed hands. Stripe completed its acquisition of OpenRouter this month for over $7 billion, taking over a routing layer that connects roughly 8 million developers to more than 400 models and forwarded quadrillions of tokens over the past year. Journalist amir’s take: if OpenRouter cements its position as “the” model aggregator, Stripe’s bid at roughly 50x forward revenue will look like a bargain.

DISTRIBUTION BATTLEAggregation platforms turn models into commodities that can be price-compared and swapped on a per-request basis — whoever ranks higher in the default route captures the incremental traffic. When a model can be swapped out with a single line of config, the only reason to stay locked to one vendor is genuinely irreplaceable capability. OpenAI is willing to subsidize here precisely because it’s betting on position in the default ranking, not on those few points of gross margin. This round of subsidies will also keep pushing labs’ pricing decisions further toward cost, leaving developers the clear net beneficiaries in the near term.

▪ SIGNALA payments company buying the model router turns AI calls into a billing business — and the biller is always closer to the user than the billed.