How I Cut AI API Costs by 45x With a Simple Routing Proxy
Dev.to AI
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Machine Learning
Generative AI
Open Source AI
AI Business
Last week I ran a simple test. I sent "Say hi" to two different AI APIs. Claude/OpenAI cost: $0.000179 Through my routing proxy: $0.000004 Same response quality. 45x price difference. The insight I analyzed a month of API traffic from a production app. Here's what I found: 72% of requests were simple tasks: classification, extraction, summarization, translation 18% were medium: multi-step analysis, moderate code generation 10% were genuinely hard: complex reasoning, system design, novel code The simple tasks ran identically on DeepSeek V4 at $0.14/M tokens.