Gergely Orosz counts 11 model-routing tools as smart routing becomes table stakes
Gergely Orosz found 11 routing and gateway products — Factory Router, Not Diamond, OpenRouter, LiteLLM, and more — that pick a cheap or frontier model per prompt, with vendors claiming 20-30% cost savings against the 10-20x price gap between models. A developer can route easy requests to open models and hold hard ones on frontier models today, and Factory AI's Matan Grinberg estimates open models now cover roughly 60% of coding work by token spend.
Source: newsletter.pragmaticengineer.com ↗
My guess is that hosted open models are sufficient in performance for around 60% of coding-related work, in terms of token spend.
Matan Grinberg, CEO, Factory AI
Why this matters
- → 10-20x price variance between models makes intelligent routing economically critical.
- → Open models now handle ~60% of coding work, enabling hybrid-model strategies.
- → Routing becomes table stakes; expect every AI vendor to offer it.
Smart routing goes mainstream