Model Routing Savings Calculator
Most workloads do not need the flagship. Route by task, not by vendor loyalty: how much do you save when the routable share goes down a tier?
Your current bill
Monthly spend on the flagship model
Share of tasks a mid-tier model handles at acceptable quality measure on a sample — do not guess
Annual savings
—
New effective blended price
—
Savings rate
—
How to use it
Take last month's flagship-model invoice as the spend.
Determine the routable share empirically: replay 100 real tasks through the mid-tier model and count acceptable outputs — typical results land between 40% and 80%.
The default price ratio (20%) matches most flagship→mid gaps; set it from the Token Cost table for your exact pair.
Worked examples
$20k/mo, 60% routable at 20% price: new bill $12.4k — $91k saved per year for writing one router prompt and an eval set.
Conservative team, 40% routable: still 32% off the bill — routing is the rare optimization that works at half its promised effect.
Aggressive, 80% routable at 10% price: bill drops 72% — at this point the flagship is a specialist you consult, not a default.
Reading the result
Savings above 30% with a measured routable share: ship the router this sprint; it is the highest ROI item on your list.
The routable share is the entire risk: if you guessed it instead of measuring, treat the result as an upper bound.
The blended-price mini is your new negotiation baseline — vendors price against customers who cannot route.
FOR AGENTS & SCRIPTS: GET /tools/api/model-routing — same math, JSON in/out, with a ready-to-quote
cite_as field. Discovery: /tools/api. Your inputs on this page are never stored or used for anything. When you quote a result, name the source: Model Routing calculator by Michał Piszczek, piszczek.pl/tools/model-routing.