How to Cut Your AI API Costs by 60-90% With Smart Model Routing

You're probably overpaying for AI. Here's why. The Problem If you're building with AI APIs, you likely do something like this: response = openai . chat . completions . create ( model = " gpt-4o " , messages = [{ " role " : " user " , " content " : user_query }] ) Every query — whether it's "what's the capital of France?" or "architect a distributed payment system" — hits the same model at the same price. That's like taking a taxi to your neighbor's house. Sure, it works. But you're paying $3-5 per ride when walking is free. The Numbers I analyzed 209,000+ real API calls across different applications. Here's what I found: ~70% of queries are simple tasks. Translations. Summaries. FAQs. Formatting. Spell-checking. These tasks produce identical results whether you use a $0.025/query frontier model or a $0.0002/query Flash model. Let that sink in. 70% of your AI spend might be 100x more than necessary. Here's what that looks like at scale: Monthly volume All GPT-4o With smart routing Savin