Router by Ramp

82 pointsposted 7 hours ago
by zackfield
(router.com)

50 Comments

aizk

6 hours ago

I just want to know how much the domain cost.

reticulates

6 hours ago

The domain was previously owned by Innovation HQ (innovationhq.com) who own tens of thousands of domains, some of the best in the world (they sold robot.com not long ago, owns/runs whatismyip.com). Innovation were asking ~$5 million for it earlier this year. Given the huge money flowing into AI router projects, I expect Ramp paid very close to asking, or perhaps a little more. So, $5 million +/- $1 million is my guess. I assume Ramp will announce the price in a few weeks to generate some more press for the project.

dvaplima

6 hours ago

I wonder if more companies use web domains as "investments" aswell

reticulates

5 hours ago

There are domain name investment companies, yes. HugeDomains owns over 5 million domains!

As for product companies, like Ramp, buying domains as an investment is generally a terrible idea. Domains are not liquid, the (hypothetical) $5 million that Ramp paid is not a price Ramp could achieve when selling the domain tomorrow. The previous owners owned Router.com for over 20 years before Ramp came along, willing to pay a lot of money for it.

Sometimes a company will buy a domain, use it, shut down whatever it was, then end up with the domain on their balance sheet for years, even decades, before someone tracks them down and offers to buy it. In those cases, the company can make money off the domain, but for every time that happens, there’s thousands more domains on balance sheets that nobody wants to pay a good amount for.

More broadly, domain name investors make their money by buying lots of domains and holding them over the long term, making their money from the very small number that sell. Part of why good domains are so expensive is that 1 sale needs to cover the cost of hundreds of even thousands of other domains that don’t sell.

sparkling

5 hours ago

Domains investors (or squatters, as one may call them) have been around since the beginning of domains.

reticulates

5 hours ago

I think you mean landlords, not squatters. Squatters are the people who occupy owned property without permission, landlords are the people who hold property, do nothing, and collect profit.

embedding-shape

2 hours ago

In the context of domains, a domain squatter would be more like someone who holds and keeps a domain without any intention of actually using it or taking it knowing someone else might have use of that exact name, they just want to sell it later for more money. In real-life I agree with your definition though, I guess it not 100% comparable, bad name that got stuck.

sparkling

5 hours ago

>InnovationHQ.com

Their site is a totally blank HTML page, it seems?

reticulates

5 hours ago

Yes, that’s how you know they’re rich rich. They’re so rich they don’t care about having a website. The reputable brokers know who they are, the serious buyers will get a message to them.

user

6 hours ago

[deleted]

latchkey

6 hours ago

Less than $7B.

Jfrydman

6 hours ago

can confirm, was less than $7B

fragmede

6 hours ago

and who owned it. Cisco, from the first Internet boom could have wanted that.

embedding-shape

7 hours ago

The fact that they put "every model" repeatedly, then don't actually support even close to "most mainstream models", makes me highly doubtful their service will be more honest and forthcoming once I'm signed up.

zackfield

6 hours ago

let us know which "mainstream" models you feel like we are missing support for! https://docs.router.com/supported-models

nattaylor

6 hours ago

Muse Spark, Gemini, mistral and something from cohere would be nice

That said the current models ain't bad!

Jfrydman

5 hours ago

Gemini models are coming soon!

minraws

6 hours ago

GLM 5.3 (maybe because not open weights)

Otherwise I think they just meant chinese models not mainstream models.

Like Hy3, Mimo, etc. Also gemini models but not sure if they are mainstream anymore.

Jfrydman

6 hours ago

I believe you are the first to request these

Save for GLM 5.3 - coming soon once it percolates through our providers.

rgbrenner

5 hours ago

link confirms exactly the complaint of the parent poster

dewey

6 hours ago

I wouldn't read too much into it, that was probably a big rush job once the Stripe / openrouter news broke.

gonzalohm

6 hours ago

I guess this is the world we live in now. All companies no matter which sector they belong to must buy AI crap.

A few years ago, companies buying random companies from a completely different sector was frowned upon by stakeholders

dgellow

6 hours ago

It’s also so strange how they all play the exact same game. Everybody creates pretty much the same products. Every software company will have a chatbot, an agentic harness, a model router, and whatever will be the next trend. It’s not an ecosystem where we see lots of different ideas with some crazy, some failing, some succeeding, it really feels like it’s a single same bet and all SF companies are sort of acting like one homogeneous meta company

b1gTekken

6 hours ago

Same happened at the start of the cloud era; everyone created a YT competitor, Twitter clones, MySpace clones, a cloud platform to host on (though it was just a wrapper around AWS like wrappers we see around OpenAI [looking at you Heroku])

Big tech emails leaked during a trial over a decade ago; C-level types agreed they need not truly compete and see each other as one big company.

Screen based filter bubble living has kept the digital generation ignorant; it's all built on the same physical principles. No point pretending, at their level, they're doing anything truly different

Mirror neurons are a helluva drug: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mirror_neuron

Society evolves slowly as generational churn is not fast

zackfield

6 hours ago

we (Ramp) didn't buy anything, we built a model router in house!

latchkey

6 hours ago

"create a cloudflare worker that proxies requests to any number of neoclouds. make no mistakes."

ashdksnndck

6 hours ago

Ramp showed up late into a market and have had more success than almost every company who tried before them. They seem to have some execution skill.

zelias

7 hours ago

It can't be a coincidence that this dropped today, the same day news dropped about the Stripe acquisition of OpenRouter

skeledrew

6 hours ago

Same day? The acquisition has been public knowledge for at least a week.

an0malous

5 hours ago

I just bought rowtr.ai, it should be ready by the time this one is acquired

AnhTho_FR

5 hours ago

Do you see Router eventually taking customer entitlements or credit balances into account, or is the plan to keep it focused on model selection?

throw03172019

6 hours ago

Why do these Router companies never have BAAs? They can easily get them with the vendors, why not sign with the customer?

latchkey

6 hours ago

because they would be meaningless words on trust me bro paper.

pickledish

7 hours ago

router.com! Cool domain though that must have been expensive :P

embedding-shape

7 hours ago

> that must have been expensive

Indeed, probably not cheap. Ironically, they see themselves as the ones that should help others "stop overpaying for things" and "help companies make better spending decisions":

> Wait, Ramp bought router.com? We did. It was either this or spend the next year spelling out a longer URL on podcasts. More importantly, we build tools that help companies make better spending decisions and stop overpaying for things.

ajd555

6 hours ago

Indeed. Also, ramp.com is shorter than router.com, so I don't really understand the "spelling out a longer URL on podcasts". I guess router.com is just clearer for customers?

Jfrydman

6 hours ago

It's certainly cheaper than buying OpenRouter for ~7B

skeledrew

6 hours ago

Looking forward to their inclusion on models.dev.

dvaplima

6 hours ago

Thats basically a direct response of OpenRouter by Stripe? ahaha

techpression

5 hours ago

"Router itself stores model inputs, outputs, and metadata and uses this data to improve the service, but users may turn this off in settings."

Why is it that every AI-product think dark UX with default data harvesting of proprietary data is a great idea? I mean it's rhetorical, stealing for training is the norm, but it's still just as disappointing every time I see it.