SmartRouter — One API for All AI Models
Most teams overspend on LLM APIs by 40-60% without realizing it. Not because they picked the wrong provider, but because they send every request to the most expensive model. This is a comprehensive playbook for cutting your LLM costs without sacrificing output quality.
Not all AI requests need GPT-4 or Claude Opus. Categorize your requests into tiers:
| Tier | Example Tasks | Recommended Models | Cost/1M tokens |
|------|--------------|-------------------|----------------|
| Simple | Classification, sentiment, extraction, summarization | DeepSeek-V3, GPT-4o-mini, Claude Haiku | $0.15-0.60 |
| Medium | Q&A, code review, translation, email drafting | GPT-4o, Claude Sonnet, Gemini 1.5 Pro | $2.50-5.00 |
| Complex | Creative writing, complex reasoning, architecture design | GPT-4o Pro, Claude Opus, Gemini 2.5 Pro | $10-50 |
Most applications have 70-80% simple and medium requests. If you route those to cheaper models, you save 40-60% of your total API bill with zero quality impact.
LLM responses are deterministic for the same input. Cache responses for:
A good cache can reduce API calls by 15-25%.
Many providers offer 50% discounts for batch processing with 24-hour turnaround. Use this for non-real-time workloads: report generation, data labeling, content analysis.
Shorter prompts = fewer tokens = lower cost. But shorter prompts can also mean worse output. The balance is prompt compression — use structured few-shot examples, remove redundant instructions, and let the model infer context from previous messages.
This is where SmartRouter excels. Instead of hardcoding which model handles which request, let the router decide based on task complexity, current pricing, and availability. Set your budget and quality requirements, and SmartRouter optimizes automatically.
Start saving: https://smartrouter.online
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