IQ Routing

IQ Routing's per-step model selection can cut LLM costs by 40-80%, turning a fixed retainer into a higher-margin engagement. For agencies running multi-step agent loops, the savings compound per step, directly boosting client lifetime value without renegotiating fees.

IQ Routing's core value for agencies is its per-step routing capability, which assigns each API call to the cheapest model that can handle it without sacrificing quality. This framework, the Cost Band Strategy, involves mapping your client's workflows into distinct quality tiers: 'cheap' for simple tasks like classification or extraction, 'auto' for balanced performance, and 'frontier' for complex reasoning or creative generation. By configuring custom band maps in IQ Routing, you can enforce these tiers per step, ensuring that a summarization call uses a cheaper model while a code generation step uses a frontier one. For an agency running a multi-step agent loop for a client, this compounds savings across thousands of calls, potentially cutting LLM costs by 40-80%. The Team plan at $70/month includes custom band maps, making it a low-cost investment that can be passed on as a managed service retainer, improving your margin on AI projects.

Inference Cost Pass-Through Ceiling is the point at which an agency can no longer absorb a model provider's price or latency change inside a fixed retainer, so the cost has to move to the client or the work has to shrink. The framework asks three questions per client engagement: what share of delivery cost is metered inference, how fast can that share be re-routed to a cheaper model, and what contract language lets you reprice. Forrester's 2027 predictions flag AI growth colliding with energy and infrastructure limits, which converts compute scarcity into API price movement on agency tools. A concrete case: an agency running document analysis on a frontier API can shift bulk classification to a smaller open-weight model served through Ollama or a gateway like Helicone, keeping the frontier model only for reasoning steps. That split is the ceiling defense.

Provider Substitution Window is the interval during which an agency can move a client workload from one model provider to another without rewriting prompts, evals, or integration code. The window is widest at the orchestration layer and narrowest at the fine-tuned weights layer: a gateway swap takes hours, a retrained model takes a quarter. Agencies that measure this window per client account know exactly when they hold pricing leverage and when a vendor holds it. Forrester's 2027 predictions flag compute and energy constraints pushing API pricing upward, which turns a wide substitution window into a margin defense rather than an engineering nicety. A concrete case: an agency routing Claude and GPT traffic through a gateway such as Helicone or Portkey can shift a client's summarization workload in an afternoon when one provider raises rates, while a competitor with hardcoded SDK calls absorbs the increase on a fixed retainer.

Adopt IQ Routing only if your agency's LLM API spend exceeds $1,000 per month and you can invest time in configuring quality thresholds per step.

Map every AI dependency in the delivery stack to a named provider, a fallback route, and a pass-through cost clause before quoting fixed-fee client work.

If your agency runs multi-step agent loops or high-volume chatbot workloads on OpenAI, Anthropic, or Google, and you can manage separate API keys for each provider, then IQ Routing's Free tier with 240 requests/min is a low-risk pilot. Upgrade to the $70/month Team plan only when you need per-team budgets, audit logs, and custom band maps to enforce cost controls across client projects.

A 5-7 day sprint to deploy IQ Routing as a drop-in LLM gateway for a client, cutting their API spend by 40-80% through automatic model routing and semantic caching.