The original title is: "Cutting our LLM bill ~80% with model routing: the actual cost math"

Short summary

Model routing—automatically sending tasks to the cheapest model that still meets quality bars—can reduce LLM bills by ~80% for typical production workloads. The pattern: classify requests by complexity, assign to appropriate model tier, escalate to stronger models on low-confidence outputs. Most production traffic isn't hard; save frontier models for the 1% that must be right.

• •Model routing can reduce LLM costs by ~80% by matching task complexity to model tier
• •Strategy: classify tasks, route to cheapest viable model, use fallback escalation on low confidence
• •Most production workloads are straightforward; frontier models needed only for high-stakes or complex tasks

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