A cheap routing call is useful only if the complete system costs less at the required quality. Compare total spend per accepted answer: the router, selected generator, verification, retries and escalations. Include duplicated input when more than one model sees the request.
For an illustrative routing request with 2,000 input tokens, the published Jev input price gives $0.000084 per assessment, or $8.40 for 100,000 assessments. Calculation: 2,000 × 100,000 ÷ 1,000,000 × $0.042. This excludes downstream model calls, retries, hosting, tax and engineering. It is arithmetic, not a measured saving. Price checked 18 September 2026.
Reducing expensive calls may preserve a provider’s available capacity. It cannot increase your contracted limits or bypass rate limiting. A router needs per-provider budgets, backoff and an explicit unavailable state.