Routing Benchmarks
How much does automatic routing actually save? This page states the claim, names the baseline, and shows the inputs, so you can recompute it rather than trust it.
The claim
Against pinning anthropic/claude-opus-5 for every request:
| Profile | Cost vs the pinned baseline |
|---|---|
auto | save 88% |
eco | save 98% |
That is the whole claim. It is a statement about which model runs your request, not about our per-token prices — see What this does not claim below.
The baseline is named, not implied
Savings are stated against pinning anthropic/claude-opus-5 for 100% of
traffic — the flagship a developer would otherwise default to for everything.
This matters more than the percentage does. A bare "up to N% cheaper" against an unstated baseline is unfalsifiable, and we shipped four different values of exactly that shape across four repos before pinning it down. Naming the baseline is what makes the figure checkable — including checkable as wrong.
The workload mix
Routing only saves money if most requests do not need the flagship. So the mix is an input, and it is an assumption we are stating rather than hiding:
| Tier | Share of requests |
|---|---|
| SIMPLE | 55% |
| MEDIUM | 25% |
| COMPLEX | 15% |
| REASONING | 5% |
Weighted toward SIMPLE because real agent traffic is: retries, tool-result summarisation, classification and formatting outnumber the calls that genuinely need frontier reasoning.
Token shape per request: 8,000 input, 1,200 output — an input-heavy coding-agent workload. Output tokens dominate cost at flagship prices, so this ratio moves the result materially. Change it and you should expect a different number.
Which model each profile picks
| Tier | eco | auto |
|---|---|---|
| SIMPLE | nvidia/deepseek-v4-flash | google/gemini-2.5-flash |
| MEDIUM | google/gemini-3.1-flash-lite | deepseek/deepseek-v4-pro |
| COMPLEX | google/gemini-3.1-flash-lite | google/gemini-3.1-pro |
| REASONING | deepseek/deepseek-reasoner | deepseek/deepseek-reasoner |
eco reaches the higher figure because its SIMPLE tier costs nothing — the free
tier absorbs the majority of traffic. auto trades some of that for headroom on
quality, which is why it is the default.
Reproduce it
Prices are not frozen into the figure. They are read from the live model catalog when the number is built, so a price change moves the published percentage instead of silently invalidating it.
- Fetch current prices from
GET /api/v1/models. - Cost one request per tier at 8,000 input / 1,200 output tokens, for the baseline and for each profile's pick.
- Weight by the mix above and compare.
The assumptions live in src/brand/savings-mix.json, and the published result
is served at /brand/numbers.json. If
your arithmetic disagrees with ours, the inputs are all there to find out why.
What this does not claim
Three things this page is not saying:
Not that our per-token prices are lower than anyone else's. Per-token chat pricing carries zero margin — you pay what the model costs. There is no per-token discount to claim, because there is no per-token markup to discount.
Not that every call gets cheaper. Add the $0.001 per-request fee and a single call to a frontier model costs marginally more here than buying that model's tokens directly. The saving comes from the 80% of requests that never needed the frontier model, not from a better rate on the ones that did.
Not a quality benchmark. These are cost figures. A profile that routes a
COMPLEX request to a smaller model saves money and may answer worse. auto
exists because that trade is real; measure it on your own traffic before
adopting eco.
Related
- ClawRouter — how constraints pick a model
- Pricing — per-model rates and the per-request fee