How to Cut LLM Costs by 60% with Smart Routing

Most teams overpay for inference because every request goes to their single most expensive model — even the trivial ones. Smart routing fixes this by matching each request to the cheapest model that clears your quality bar.

The core idea

Not every prompt needs a frontier model. Classification, extraction, and short summaries often run just as well on a model that costs a tenth as much. A router lets you express intent instead of hardcoding a model:

{
  "model": "auto",
  "route": { "strategy": "cheapest", "min_quality": 0.85 },
  "messages": [{ "role": "user", "content": "Extract the invoice total." }]
}

Four routing strategies that save money

1. Cheapest-qualified — pick the lowest-cost model above a quality threshold.
2. Tiered fallback — try a small model first, escalate only on low confidence.
3. Latency-aware — route interactive traffic to fast models, batch jobs to cheap ones.
4. Provider failover — when one vendor rate-limits you, spill over instead of retrying.

Measuring the impact

Routing only works if you can see it. ModGate records cost and tokens per request, so you can compare spend before and after. A typical mix of classification plus generation workloads sees 40–60% savings once the small-model tier absorbs the easy traffic.

Tip: start conservative. Route 10% of traffic through auto, watch quality metrics, then ramp up.

Bringing your own keys

Already have committed-use discounts with a provider? Use BYOK to keep usage on your own account while still getting unified routing, retries, and analytics — ModGate never bills you for those tokens.

Get started

Read the routing docs for the full strategy reference, or create a key and route your first request today.