The 600x LLM Price Gap Is Your Biggest Optimization Opportunity

GPT-OSS-20B costs $0.05 per million input tokens. Grok-4 costs $30. That's a 600x spread. Even comparing production-grade models, GPT-5 mini at $0.25/M vs Claude Opus 4 at $5/M is a 20x difference. Most teams pick one model and send everything to it. That's like shipping every package via overnight express, including the ones that could go ground. The routing idea is simple Not every prompt needs a frontier model. "Summarize this paragraph" and "Design a distributed system architecture" are fundamentally different tasks. One needs Claude Opus. The other works fine on GPT-5-mini at $0.10/M. Smart routing classifies each prompt before it hits the API and sends it to the cheapest model that can handle it well. What this looks like in practice I built NadirClaw to do exactly this. It sits between your app and your LLM providers as an OpenAI-compatible proxy. The classification step takes about 10ms. Here's what happens: Your app sends a request to NadirClaw (same format as OpenAI API) Nadi