Intelligent AI Routing Rules That Pick the Cheapest Model That Still Meets Quality (with Practical Examples)
Most teams do one of two things with LLMs: they pick one "safe" premium model and accept the bill, or they swap models by hand and hope nothing breaks. Both approaches get old fast when traffic grows, prices change, or one provider has a rough day. Intelligent routing rules fix that by making model choice automatic. Instead of "always use Model X," you set constraints like price, latency budget, context window, and a minimum quality bar. Each request gets the cheapest model that can still do the job, and it escalates only when it needs to.