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AI routing
The category page: what AI routing is, the seven kinds of routing one request can go through - model, agent, tool, skill, workflow, human and policy - how a router scores and explains a decision, where it sits in an architecture, and the pages on this site for each kind. Written to be cited.
Free plan, no card. Open source under Apache-2.0; self-hosting is free forever.
From the benchmark
7
kinds of routing, one decision
Model, agent, tool, skill, workflow, human and policy routing share one catalogue, one scoring pass and one trace. On 150 real prompts the model-routing part alone cut spend by 89% against always-frontier at a higher judged quality.
The whole benchmark, with the cases the router lostThe problem
A model name in a config file is a routing decision. So is the if/else that sends long prompts to the big model, the retry that falls back to a second vendor, the regex that keeps card numbers away from a public API, the button that hands a chat to a person. Spread across applications and written by hand, none of it is priced, traced or learned from - and all of it is wrong a month later.
How the router answers it
Task type, complexity, domain, language, personal data, code - signals extracted before any model is called, in microseconds, on the device or in the router.
Hard constraints remove what may not answer: data boundary, region, tenant, budget, allowed targets. What remains is ranked on quality for this task, cost for this length, latency and your weights.
The best target answers - a model, an agent, a tool, a skill, a plan or a person. The trace records the alternatives and the reason; the outcome you report moves the next decision.
A real request
Account data and an escalation ask: policy pins the request away from public models and the ranking lands on the human queue, with the trace saying which rule fired and what the models would have cost.
curl -s https://opensmartroute.ai/api/v1/route \
-H "Authorization: Bearer $OSR_API_KEY" \
-H "Content-Type: application/json" \
-d '{"text": "<prompt>"}'The kinds of routing
Read next
Install
pip install "opensmartroute[yaml]"Or no install at all: the hosted API answers a plain curl with the decision, and the browser extension shows the price and the router's pick under the composer of the AI chat sites you already use.
OpenSmartRoute is open source and the free plan keeps the full trace of every decision. Create a workspace, mint a key and send the request above.
Free plan, no card. Fifteen thousand decisions a month with the full trace.